Nicholas, of course, had always been especially subject to her commands; even as a teen he couldn’t help but follow her wishes without argument. At some point she would find herself being particularly unreasonable, sometimes squarely merciless, hoping he would argue or talk back sharply to her, but he never did, merely assenting or else drifting off to another room of the apartment. Was it his character to be so compliant, or had she also formed him with those trenchant comments at the shop? Like any mother she sometimes found herself furious with him, for nothing other than his being a child. Later on the reasons would be different. In any case, she couldn’t help herself and probably Nicholas couldn’t either and after he left home and had been gone for months and neither written nor telephoned she wondered whether an objective observer would determine that on balance she had been the most damaging presence in his life.
That he had gone on so readily to a career of larceny seemed confirmation enough of the notion. Clines reminded her several times that these were still alleged crimes, but she knew the truth had already been long determined. For Nicholas had a history of stealing. It was not a problem before, though in truth only because he was never caught. From the time he was seven he filched candies and gum from the news shop and playing cards and felt markers from Woolworth’s, and later on, when he was in middle school, he stole record albums and books from the public libraries, expensive clothes from department stores. She periodically discovered a cache tucked deep in his closet or between the mattress and box spring of his bed, once finding three brand-new pairs of designer blue jeans, another time two ski parkas, none in his size. She supposed he sold them, or gave them away to his friends. It didn’t surprise her that he was never caught: he was a smart, charming, gentle-faced boy who walked easefully into rooms and could still look you in the eye and say hello while fitted with whatever goods he’d tucked beneath his shirt.
What was remarkable was that June never confronted him. Not a reprimand, not even an innocent question or comment about the loot. She would put the stuff back in its place, as if she’d found a pornographic magazine. But why? It wasn’t as if stealing were a typical boyhood stage to be outgrown. She could have spanked him the very first time, on finding a dozen packs of various gums stuffed into a sock, harshly punished or scared him into never doing such a thing again. But it seemed that each time she found a new stash she’d somehow discount the previous instances, see them as isolated, even accidental, cases in which Nicholas simply forgot to pay; she’d done that herself a couple of times, once resulting in an embarrassing frisking at a store entrance by the security guard. Nicholas was naturally preoccupied, yes, that was a problem, but the truth of the matter was that June began to look almost expectantly to the stealing. She would go into his room whenever he wasn’t there, half-hoping to find something. Of course whenever she did she felt frustration and bewilderment, but then a kind of dreadful curiosity about the moment itself took hold of her such that the larger, more disturbing picture dissipated and she focused too discreetly on the act; she would wonder about the particular circumstances of its moment, the part of the store he was in, if he had been nearly caught and his heart had raced terribly, and then what he was thinking, or not thinking, the faces of his compulsion.
Once she had followed him, seeing him by chance walking by on the other side of the avenue from her shop. He was thirteen at the time. She quickly closed the shop and trailed him until he went into a record store. She peered in at him from the sidewalk, making sure he couldn’t see her by standing at the edge of the large display window. She was terribly anxious; she couldn’t see how he could possibly take anything: as it was a warm summer day, he was wearing the lightest clothing, just a polo shirt and gym shorts. He browsed albums, lingered at a bin of tapes, a poster rack, and then, as if idly picking a leaf from a shrub while strolling by, he took an album and walked toward the entrance, which was right in front of the cashier. He was almost outside when the man stopped him and pointed to the album in his hands. Nicholas seemed to wake from a trance-and not in the least like he was pretending-and after apologies and a shared laugh, he paid for the record and left. By chance he departed in the opposite direction from her and when she caught sight of him again around the corner he was discarding the new album, paper sack and all, into a steel mesh trash can. Then he reached behind himself, lifting his shirt, and from the band of his shorts pulled out an orange-colored eight-track tape. He seemed genuinely pleased, letting the light play off the clear plastic wrapping like it was a prismatic mirror, regarding the lettering closely front and back, but then with a chilling casualness he dropped it into the trash as well.
Afterward Nicholas headed south on Third Avenue, his hands calm and empty. Was he on to a usual string of unsuspecting shops? His skinny form bobbed and then finally disappeared on the crowded lunchtime sidewalk. She tried following him but lost his trail. But she had to halt, too, because she was caught squarely by the feeling of her chest tightening around the ingot of a sudden pleasing fascination; for it was the picture of his surface equanimity, his self-mastery, that she was so gratified to see, to watch him exert himself upon the world, when the rest of the time he seemed too willingly subject to its turns. He was more like herself than she had guessed; for even though she held no illusions of being an admirable person, she had always been capable of making her way, no matter what.
“Do you have any children, Mr. Clines? Excuse me, I don’t even know if you have a wife.”
“My wife died many years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I have a daughter,” Clines said. They were stopped at a long traffic light. “She lives in Philadelphia.”
“What does she do?”
“She and her husband are both clerks in a grocery store.”
“Do they have children?”
“No.”
He was clearly hesitant to continue, but for some reason June felt like querying him.
“You must see her fairly often, being nearby.”
“Only sometimes.”
“On holidays?”
“No, not on holidays,” he said, clearing his throat. The light changed and they proceeded for a few blocks in quiet. He was driving quite stiffly, with both hands firmly on the steering wheel, his head locked straight ahead. She was ready to drop the subject but then he said, “We haven’t spoken in some time.”
“May I ask why?”
“I don’t know why, Mrs. Singer. Nothing bad ever happened between us. There’s no animosity. In fact, I would like to leave her with a decent amount of money, whenever I go. If I didn’t have her, I’d probably have retired already. But she would never know that. I would have to say we didn’t talk too much. Even when she was young.”
“Do you think you should have?”
“I doubt it would have made a difference. Neither of us is very talkative. But I truly don’t know,” he said, with a sudden heaviness that revealed his full age. “Do you think you should have done something differently?”
“With Nicholas? No. I don’t think so.”
Clines didn’t say anything else, and although she knew she was likely sounding defensive or callous she let him drive on without explaining herself further. For she had indeed offered Nicholas everything she had been capable of giving, and more, even as she knew by the time he was three that it might somehow never be enough. Perhaps no matter what you did you could never love someone out of his nature, love someone out of his fate. Love, she had come to believe, had no such power.
Was his nature hers? In the antiques business she had tried to be honest whenever possible, though with old furniture and objets d’art it was difficult to follow completely ethical practices. It was a structurally unreliable enterprise, if not, at times, downright chicane. For one could never really be sure of the provenance of a piece, no matter what anyone told you, whether well intentioned or not. She herself, especially in the beginning, had often paid more than she should have, from dealers and “original owners
” alike. Certainly there were markers that you could look to on a piece of furniture-say, details of the drawer construction, the quality of the leg fluting-but ultimately those things could be contrived. Fakes abounded in every era, most of them poorly done, but there were always a few masterfully executed works. Of course, for the vast majority of non-auction-house items there was only the experienced eye and what one could say about them without simply lying or even sounding like a prevaricator. Authenticity ultimately lay in the story you could tell, a tale most effective when it was at once fanciful and mundane. You had to offer differing scales, unlikely modulations, though all based upon the firmest-seeming foundation. It turned out she was quite good at this, her upright bearing and careful, precise way of speaking enjoining her clients to trust both her and their own taste implicitly, and if over the years there were a few instances of suspicion or unhappiness, she never had any problems with the final disposition concerning anything she had sold.
Of course when she was young June had stolen things outright, too, but it had been a matter of survival, plain and simple, as with the old farmer’s blanket, and dozens of other items and foodstuffs during the war and its aftermath. And yet, even after she was settled in the orphanage, where there was plenty of food, where there was shelter and safety, there were instances when she would steal things from the other children that could hardly benefit her, and only gave them great unhappiness. Certain sentimental objects drew her eye: a boy’s prized marbles. A girl’s silver bracelet, which had once been her mother’s. A particularly egregious theft had been of a flimsy, creased photograph of a family, which she’d lifted from the back pocket of a sleeping boy. She had nothing against the boy, in fact he was sometimes friendly to her, while most of the others avoided her. Yet she waited three full days before giving it back. She watched him search frantically through his few things, comb the play yard and classrooms on his hands and knees, then could hear him crying one afternoon in the boys’ quarters, blubbering to his dead parents, asking their forgiveness for losing his only image of them. She felt immense in her cruelty, but she told herself, too, that he ought to accept that they were forever gone, that he was actually cursed by having the picture, that he merely weakened himself by examining it all the time and depending on it as though it were his sole source of strength and faith.
No one found out she had taken the photograph, nor about any of the things she’d stolen from the other children. She was suspected, naturally, but nothing was ever proven. The only time she was discovered was when she returned something she openly admitted to taking. It was a book of Sylvie Tanner’s, one that she always kept on the stool that served as a nightstand beside her bed. June had asked her if she could be their helper, and perhaps because of her reputation as a problem child Sylvie had agreed, assigning June the task of sweeping and dusting their cottage as part of her orphanage chores. There were always other books in the stack, books borrowed for Sylvie every other week by Hector Brennan from the Eighth Army base in Seoul, but those would change and rotate, while the slim volume would remain, the only book, besides the Bible and a hymnal, they had brought with them from the States.
June asked her to read it aloud to her but Sylvie said it was not like poetry, or a children’s story, something to be enjoyed; it was an account of war, and she said that June didn’t need to read about it. But June persisted, if only because she saw how Sylvie handled the book, with indeed a kind of enjoyment, a certain somber savoring. June would peer inside the bedroom when she was supposed to be dusting, or creep behind to the plot in back, and there would be Sylvie with the faded-blue cloth-covered book in her clutch, often not even reading it, more keeping it close, her form characteristically folded up in a chair with it tucked against her chest, or propped beneath her chin. Whenever June was in the house alone she would steal into the room and try to read a page. It was difficult for her-she was otherwise reading mostly English primers then, though easily-and she realized it would take her hours simply to get past the preface and initial pages of historical background.
So she took it, reading it in her spare late-afternoon hours in the cover of a natural bunker amid the hillside brush and weeds. When the account of the battle began the writing became clearer to her, the words sharpening and crystallizing and soon enough disappearing, the reading coming to her as easily as if she were viewing a picture show in a theater. What the author saw of the battle was horrifying, the grinding carnage of the cavalry charges, of the artillery rounds and chain-gun shot, the piles of sundered, crushed bodies and scattered human remains, the veritable rivers of blood, but it was in fact the days following that haunted him most. It was the unspeakable fate of the wounded that haunted him, their privation and “perfect torture” because of the grave lack of food and water and medical supplies, most of the caretakers being laypersons like himself or the local townsfolk, all willing to aid the survivors but frightfully incapable of doing so. All the churches in the area surrounding the town called Solferino were filled with miserable soldiers, the air of their sanctuaries fouled with the stench of the dead and dying.
After a few days Sylvie Tanner asked her if she’d seen the book. June shook her head, wondering aloud if Hector had taken it back by accident with some other books to the base library. It was an uncharacteristically poor lie from her, as if she intended to make obvious her guilt, but it worked, in that Sylvie told her that if they could somehow get it back from the base, she might be willing to read and discuss it with her. The next day June slipped off to the half-buried rifle-shell canister where she’d hidden it, brushed the dirt from its cover, and took it back to the cottage. Reverend Tanner recognized the book in her hands and asked what she was doing with it but Sylvie came in then from the small rear plot and exclaimed, “Oh, you sweet dear, you got it back for me!”
Yet she still refused to read the book with June, who then begged her if they might read others together regularly, after her chores. Sylvie hesitated, surely worried about showing even more favor to her, but eventually agreed when confronted with what June could contrive of her face, when she required, blunting its hardened aspects to the rounded eyes and tender cheeks of any other girl her age, back to the waif she should have been. After June quickly completed the cleaning they’d sit up in her bed and read aloud to each other until it was time to join everyone else in preparing the tables for supper. June found that her usually constant feeling of hunger would magically subside-after the war and for the rest of her life it would never quite disappear (she was like a stray cat that way, always willing to eat, no matter the state of her belly, of course except now)-and she would have stayed with Mrs. Tanner all night if she let her, losing herself in the warm tuck of her side.
Still, June kept reading the book to herself whenever she had a free moment; she couldn’t help but imagine that it was Sylvie Tanner who was the witness and author of the book, as if she had seen with her own eyes the fierce fighting and wretched wounded in the churches, had toiled to alleviate the suffering without the aid of medicines or clean bandages or food. There was an inscription on the book’s title page, written in a handsome, flowing, old-fashioned hand, To our steadfast daughter. May you be an angel of mercy, and it was Nicholas who once asked June, when he was seven or eight, what a “steadfast” person was, holding the very book in his hands. The blue cloth cover had been long burned away and the binding was crackly and exposed, though the inner pages were intact. Because of its fragile condition she kept it in a large jewelry box on her bureau.
She heard herself tell him what Sylvie had said to her, almost to the word: “Someone who is firm in his person and beliefs, who brings to the world a constant heart.”
“Are you an angel of mercy?”
“I would like to be one,” she told him, realizing that of course he assumed the inscription was meant for her. “We should all try to be.”
He nodded, then gingerly placed the book back in the jewelry box. Sometimes she could tell that he had come in and inspected
the book, tiny bits of charred paper left on the bureau top, and though she would have preferred his not handling it, and then taking such an interest in its harrowing, difficult content, she grew to see the activity as a strange kind of intimacy between them, a way to let him peek into her life and past without her having to tell him a thing. Then one day, when he was older, in sixth grade, he came into the kitchen with the book and asked whose it really was-he’d realized the illogic of the English inscription, when her parents had been Korean-and she told him it was a gift from a friend. A woman who had helped her when she was a girl but who died after the war.
“What was her name?”
She told him and though it could mean nothing to him the name seemed to spark his imagination as might a character in a story. “What happened to her?”
“There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“A fire.”
He didn’t say anything to this. Nicholas, always very mindful of her emotions, did not push her on it. They sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, “Is that where you met my father?”
“Where?”
“Solferino.”
She shook her head. “I’ve not been there.”
“Do you know what’s there now?”
“I imagine there’s a small town. I know there’s a church.”
“I bet it’s a special one,” Nicholas said. “You think it’s like in the book we have on the Vatican? Full of fancy stuff, like gold statues and paintings?”
“You mean great treasure and riches? Maybe so.”
“We should go someday,” he said excitedly. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes, we should,” she answered, even if she had always imagined visiting the place by herself.
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