The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “My favorite place on the whole shore,” she panted, excited by the sight of it. “You can just see it, past the brush at the very edge. It’s a miniature castle, a one-room castle … God only knows who built it but I found it years ago and I’ve never seen anyone else here. I’ve never heard anyone even mention it.” She moved on, over the flat edges, across the treacherous loose stones, and I followed her with the brown bag. It wasn’t my element but she seemed at home, an altogether different person from the one at Riverfront Towers; she knew what she was doing; it was as if she’d truly come home.

  She’d gotten several yards ahead of me and when she called something back over her shoulder the rumble of the surf washed it away. I smiled and followed, watching her stretch and flex as she climbed up from the stones to the ledge of earth with the slippery grass. I handed up the brown bag and took her hand, pulling myself against her weight. She had color in her cheeks and a big smile across her face; she was the picture of health and security and independence, reminded me of a bitchy, too-blessed girl I’d known in college, a girl who’d seemed unapproachable to all of us who were not ourselves exactly godlike. Instead of making me feel an antique, beset by entropy and creeping damp, Kim pushed me to feel young, to make me want to lose weight and take to regular exercise and recycle myself into the time of my life when I could still fall in love.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging my sleeve. “There it is.”

  She pushed through some head-high shrubbery, led me into a sandy clearing, circular with a carefully built tower erected in its center. The stones were native, from the large chips of boulder studding the shoreline, and the largest ones at the base could easily have weighed a thousand pounds or more. They had been meticulously placed, mortared, and fit against adjacent stones; a fireplace had necessitated a chimney up one side. There was a single entrance opposite the hearth. At eye level above a wide stone bench was an opening which provided a view of the lake.

  We stood inside, out of the lashing rain, which had intensified in the past minutes, and she hugged herself gleefully, happy to be there. I set the bag on the bench and looked at her, at the glittering eyes, the controlled energy as she surveyed the simple interior of her castle.

  “It’s always just the way I left it, whenever I come back. See, my logs stacked beside the fireplace, a pile of newspapers, box of matches in an oilskin.” She widened her eyes at the wonder of it all. “Never any evidence of anyone else …” Her pigtails hung forward over her shoulders.

  “Whose land is this?”

  “No idea. Somebody went to the trouble of building it and just went away. I come here every time I come north … sleep on the bench in the summer. It gets cold at night but the fire is enough to keep you warm.” She started unpacking the groceries. “Lake air makes me hungry.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “You get the fire going,” she said.

  The heat radiated from the stones, filling the castle with aromatic, woodsy warmth. When I was done she was uncorking a bottle of wine, pouring it into an old-fashioned blue metal coffeepot she took from under the bench. She dropped in pieces of apple, raisins, orange sections, and cinnamon sticks and put it on the grill above the snapping logs.

  While the wind blew an occasional spray of rain through the window, we sat on the earth floor before the fire and ate slabs of crumbling cheddar on fresh bread we tore from the loaf with our fingers. She sliced thick chunks of summer sausage and we washed the garlic away with the spiced hot wine.

  “Cozy, isn’t it?” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “It’s like a nest … when I was a child I always tried to make a nest out of my pillows and blankets, I pretended I was a squirrel. I always thought a squirrel must have it pretty good in his tree. Walt Disney effect, I suppose.” She sighed, munched on cheese. “My analyst never pursued it, much to my surprise. He kept nudging me toward my sex life and I kept telling him that what I most liked to do in bed was build nests and pretend I was a squirrel. Poor man.”

  “I like it,” I said. “It’s a long way from real life.”

  “Well, maybe this is what’s real. All the rest of it is pretend.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  We bundled up again and went for an hour’s walk along the beach, our faces tingling in the rain and wind, leaving a long trail of double tracks. The wind dug at us and we didn’t talk much; it was hard even to think. The enjoyment came from the physical effort and it was the first quiet time I’d had in a long time. Up the curve of shoreline, well beyond any last sight of the castle, she nodded to go back and we turned, went back climbing along the flat ledges of rock that lay wet and black like gigantic shingles.

  Anxiously we sucked the hot wine, battling the bone chill. She sat opposite me, the fire between us, our backs propped against heavy stones. She smiled softly, her hands locked round the hot metal cup.

  “I’ve never brought anyone else here,” she said solemnly.

  “Why me?”

  “I honestly don’t know. The fatalist in me surfaces when it comes to you, I don’t know why. I can’t quite seem to get rid of you—I don’t mean that unkindly, Paul. We just keep coming together. It wouldn’t be unusual for most people. But it is very unusual for me.” Her mouth tightened characteristically.

  “Without meaning to sound rhetorical, pretentious, or overly windy,” I said, “I don’t know you, who you are, Kim. The more I’m with you, the more I learn about you, the less I know … the less it seems to me I know, the more of a mystery you are.” I heard myself laughing nervously; she watched me levelly.

  “You learned a good deal about me this morning,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone who wanted to find out so badly … maybe now you know enough.” It had become a game between us: I seek, I find a bit here, a trinket there, fragments of who and what she was. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to know. It had begun with a suicide and moved on to a murder. Now it had become something within me, something I didn’t want to name.

  “Well, there’s something funny going on with us, isn’t there?”

  “No point in asking me,” she said. “You’re the one—”

  “But there is. You know there is. You can feel it.” I wanted her to admit it.

  “Look, I only hope you’re satisfied now. You can’t say I’ve avoided you, that I’ve closed myself to you. I came to you this morning. I wouldn’t have had to, would I?” She shifted against the stone, bent her knees up, looked at me from between them. “Be satisfied with the present, the way I am now … the way you know me now.”

  We listened to all the muttering sounds. I threw another piece of driftwood onto the fire. Through the window the sky was darkening.

  “Has it occurred to you how much alike we are?” I asked.

  “How could it? You’re the one who’s been finding out about me. I know nothing about you.”

  “Well, you and I are insulated from life, I think, we’re afraid to let ourselves get caught up in it. We’ve been betrayed, hurt … this morning you told me the story of a child who was batted around like a handball.” I sipped my wine and she sniffed, her chin resting in a bridge of her hands. “If you’re frigid, if, it all fits, in my mind …” I watched her; she remained expressionless, eyes impersonal, listening. “And I’m the same, too far from people to make contact easily. Sometimes I feel like an icy disk skimming through the dark, never touching anything.”

  “You’re very poetic,” she said tonelessly.

  “You’ve told me some secrets,” I said. “You’ve brought me here, where you’ve always come alone …” I took a deep breath. “Now I’ll take you somewhere … where I’ve never taken anyone else. I’ll tell you a true story.”

  I’d been thinking for several days about what happened to me in Finland, when I’d killed a man. I’d never told anyone. General Goode knew the story, its bare facts, but I’d never told him what actually happened. How it felt and what it did to me. He may have known that I hated him, mo
re than hated him, but he didn’t really know why. No one knew but me. I’d never wanted to tell anyone before, not even Anne.

  I followed the old man onto the train, up wooden steps into a machine that was very old and drafty and threadbare. My first plan had been to kill him by “accident,” by shoving him onto the track in the path of the locomotive. It was the way they did it in the movies but two men alone on a platform in the middle of Finland, with a stationmaster watching from about twenty paces away and a locomotive that was rolling very slowly to a stop—that was real life and it did not lend itself to murder.

  I sat across from him in the uncomfortable, rocking compartment, watched him doze intermittently between spells of staring out into the utter darkness. It was something over an hour to Helsinki and it was a peculiar necessity I faced: If the old man reached Helsinki with his tattered briefcase, both he and I would be killed. He by the Finnish Communist apparat, I almost surely by the CIA. If I, on the other hand, managed to terminate the old man and deliver his briefcase to a Mr. Appleton at the arrival dock in Helsinki, then Mr. Appleton would not kill me and I’d be in London by noon of the next day.

  As the train bumped along, the old man’s noggin bouncing in his half sleep, I considered my situation with unalloyed dismay. Terror is a relative thing—relative to what you are in danger of losing, in this case my life—and what I felt had surely oozed into a netherland on the far side of terror. I had become, through my own innocence and the calculations of General Jon Goode, a man with a mission, without the slightest hint of what I was actually doing, only that it had to be done. Once in, never out, Goode told me a safe time later in the course of apologizing for having landed me in such a “pickle”—his word, not mine.

  I did not know then, nor do I know now, what it was I delivered to Mr. Appleton’s office in Helsinki (he dealt in bicycles, his office cluttered with instruction manuals, spare chains, bicycles in various states of assembly as if they’d been abandoned in haste). He accepted it, a thick manila envelope, and asked me to return the next day. He hoped I would enjoy myself and urged me to take in the world’s largest bookstore and wasn’t I surprised to find it in Helsinki? Mr. Appleton had thinning hair, a Ben Turpin mustache, and when he stood up he looked quite miraculously like a human bridge piling.

  The next day he told me that “my friend in London”—that would be Goode, who had prevailed on me to do this dirty work over a dinner he was buying me at Claridge’s because I was the son of an old friend—had another small errand for me to undertake. I asked too many questions, because Mr. Appleton became cross with me and concluded a most persuasive oration by smashing one of those snowfall paperweights against his office wall. He told me that I had to do what he asked, that there was no reason for me to know what the errand involved—only that my life depended on it. The discussion took several hours but that was the thrust of it; it was unfortunate but I would have to make contact with an elderly doctor in a village not too far from Helsinki and pick up a package. The village was not safe for Mr. Appleton and his friends; I would be perfect, in Mr. Appleton’s view, and he told me that the doctor had been alerted to have ready for me what I was to take out.

  Nothing went quite the way it was supposed to, of course, and when I got to the village the doctor had decided not to cooperate. We left notes for each other in the best tradition of pulp fiction; under no circumstances were we to be seen together. For three days, while I nervously pretended to be a tourist (not the easiest thing to do in a village of only a few hundred souls in Finland, during the restrictive, windblown, snowy winter), we argued in our pathetic written notes. I spied on him, saw who he was, kept to myself. Finally, confused, I saw him steal out that night and, like an animal scurrying for its life, make for the railway station.

  Mr. Appleton had given me instructions for several possible eventualities. In case the doctor took flight, in whatever direction, I had only one task: kill him. He told me several ways to do it. If he had the briefcase, take it. Give it to him, Appleton, in Helsinki. He explained with great care the crucial advantage I had in this unlikely, obscene situation; the other side (I have no idea who they were) had no way of knowing me or what I was up to. By the time they discovered it, it would be much too late to do anything about it. Thus, I was the man my country needed. It was insane.

  But Mr. Appleton was, I was absolutely certain, capable of killing me. And all I could think of was how best to save my own skin. Watching the night whisk by in spotty bits of moonlight, listening to the heavy breathing of the doctor across the way, I fought it out of my mind.

  Who was less likely to kill me—Appleton or the lads who were going gunning for the doctor? If I killed the old man, Appleton had told me I was safe, out of it, on my way. If I failed to kill the old man, Appleton had assured me that he himself would kill me. But would he? Would he really kill me? Would I die without ever knowing what I’d stumbled into?

  I killed the old man with the .38-caliber pistol Mr. Appleton had given me. I did it in the compartment while he slept, pressing the barrel where I thought his heart would be. I couldn’t risk a head shot; I didn’t want anyone to know he was dead until, at least, the train reached Helsinki. I got off the train in a suburb, took a taxi to the railroad terminal, and surprised Mr. Appleton, who was waiting to greet me and take my briefcase or kill me.

  I felt as if I’d turned into a dark hallway where I would walk forever. I heard Appleton chuckling underneath the absurd brushlike mustache, felt his huge hand on my back. He told me he was sorry I’d gotten involved and had to do what I did, but I should remember that it was a war and we all had to be ever vigilant.

  I didn’t see Goode in London; I was afraid I’d try to kill him with my bare hands. For months, then years, I dreamed about the old man, the white stubble on his chin, the deep lines scooped out of the pink white cheeks, the smell of cologne and age. I would wake up in the night, nauseated, hearing the rush of breath, the rustling of dry lips, the soft grunt from the unconscious sleeping man as he took the impact of the bullet …

  My life was never the same. I became a different, less human being and I mourned the loss of myself. I split apart, as if cleaved by an ax, and half died. Half a man remained and that half knew a terrible thing: It had killed a whole man to save only half of itself. There was a built-in error. How could the thing that remained ever prove that the price paid for continued existence was worth it? And how could it ever reach out to another human, a fellow, and make the connection? There was something missing. Something necessary.

  It was dark when I finished the story. I felt as if I’d undergone some extremely punishing physical activity. I was out of breath and my memory had been beaten to jelly. Self-consciously I tried to laugh and produced a groan, tried to muffle it by clearing my throat. Confession was good for the soul, and I’d never quite located mine.

  The shape that was Kim, a shadow in the faint glow from the embers, leaned toward me, her face pink in the memory of the flames and her cheeks wet. I heard her sniffle, saw her hand swipe across her face. She rested her hand on my arm, consoling.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve cried, too. I’ve cried for that poor old man … but he’s still there, there’s no getting free of him. He’s there, he’ll always be there. He’ll die when I die, only then.” I took her hand in mine, felt the wetness of her tears.

  “No,” she whispered, “no, for you, I’m crying for you, not the old man.” She swallowed hard. “Killing someone to save yourself … We’re programmed to survive. It’s not unnatural to kill, particularly not for survival. Jesus …” She pulled her hand away and threw a pebble into the embers, sparks showering upward, a bright fountain. “He was right, your Mr. Appleton. It’s a war, it was a war, and war rules are different. You got caught in it, you had to kill someone. It was the only way out. Sometimes you have to do things …”

  “It’s the living with it,” I said. “The killing was easy. Knowing what you did, the choice you made … that’s hard.”


  She let herself lean against me as we walked back across the ledges to the car. I had my arm around her shoulder. We drove in silence, sat quietly in the turnaround before the lodge. Rain came and went, mist clinging and ground fog building up in pockets.

  “Thank you for the picnic,” I said. “The whole day. It’s been a nice surprise. Better than nice.”

  She smiled and nodded. I leaned across the car, touched her face, turning her toward me. I kissed her tentatively and she kissed me back, without passion, but comfortably, without resistance. It didn’t last long.

  “I’m going back to spend the evening with Ted. Go to bed early. Days outside in weather like this can wear you out.”

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “I enjoyed the day, too.”

  I got out and looked back through the window. I could taste her faintly on my mouth. She pulled the huge car in a slow, deliberate arc and moved serenely off into the night, snatched from my sight by an abrupt turning in the narrow roadway.

  I stood on the porch for a while watching the clouds of fog gather around the lodge like the mists of Brigadoon. My father and all the rest of them, the good and the bad, had stood where I stood, watching identical nighttimes softly closing around them. I was aware of them, the fact that they had been there once, frail and human and foolish, but the woman was pushing them into the perspective they deserved. She was in the here and now, and I had told her my most awesome secret. And I had kissed her, which may not have been much of a seventies accomplishment but then I wasn’t much of a seventies man.

  I sat on a living-room couch, half reading a beat-up paperback copy of C. P. Snow’s The Masters which had been left in a pocket of my suitcase from a trip long ago. But the image in my mind was Dana Andrews in Laura, sitting in the empty apartment with rain streaming down the windowpanes, falling in love with a painting. He was a forties man and I knew how his mind worked. And I wondered what the day had meant to Kim, the day and the kiss. It seemed so large to me. Could it possibly have meant anything comparable to her?