We crept past the miniature carriage bays and then upstairs in faint light. Sylphide’s vastly complicated and thoroughly up-to-date will and endowment had expressly required that the poolhouse remain unused but maintained. At any rate, no one had been in there but the High Side cleaning staff, and they with strictest instructions from William to keep it as it was, and it was neat, very clean, maybe a little stuffy, a pail and mop carelessly left out in the first kitchen. Right at that undersized stove the dancer and I had warmed the exquisite food that had been brought us. Right at that counter, had opened the wine. Right on that bearskin in front of that fireplace, well, a lot of stuff, those indolent days of our sojourn. The taste of jasmine came to my tongue, the taste of her sweat, her salty creases.
“You were here with Dabney,” I said.
“And you were here with her,” Kate said, a couple notches north of neutral.
“Yes,” I said: no more lies. Or, at any rate, fewer.
She led me down the hallway past the many little bedrooms to the familiar linen closet, marched straight inside, pushed the corner of the correct shelf, swung the secret door into the beautiful bedroom, which was preserved as if it were a stage set. My grief hooked me once more, bottomless mourning, a musty wave of emotion, something emerging from behind glass, something former shaking off the dust.
“He said to look under the moss,” Kate said evenly.
Dabney, she meant. In her dream. Or Daddy—she wasn’t sure, rather blended the two words. Reluctantly, I helped her move a little wooden chest (we both knew what was in it—checkers, card games, ivory dice cups, antique jigsaw puzzles), lifted a corner of the dense green woolen carpet (mossy, okay, sure). Beautiful, patterned parquet floor under there, nothing else. We slid the chest back into place, moved the loveseat in the next corner (I supposed we both knew that piece of furniture very well; anyway there was a mutual hesitation), lifted the moss—nothing. I didn’t want to have to move the bed, but we did, pulled it out from the wall much more easily than you’d think, expensive old casters sliding smooth as skin on skin. Kate lifted the corner of the carpet, folded it back. Underneath was a hatch as on a ship, old brass hinges, old brass handle, all of it beautifully recessed in the wood. Kate turned the latch, lifted the hatch easily, but only revealed another hatch, much lighter wood, tiny golden lock.
Which, of course, Kate’s key fit, effortless clockwork mechanism. “Look,” she hissed.
I could not. I only saw Dad, saw him catching one of the dozens of footballs he let me throw at him every afternoon when I was ten, eleven, twelve, felt the pop of the footballs in my chest as they came back, one by one into the hundreds, the thousands, probably tens of thousands over the years. And then Mom, of course, Mom spinning off to the club in her whites, hair mounted in a perfect pouf, legs up to here, off to slaughter the tennis ladies, merciless.
Down in the snug compartment was his briefcase, all right, unmistakable icon of my youth. Kate knelt, tried valiantly, but couldn’t get it out of the hidey-hole. So I bent down there, found the handle, jimmied the thing, a very difficult fit, as if the compartment had been made just for the briefcase. Old Samsonite hard-shell, Dad’s initials stamped in vainglorious gold under the handle. One of those combination locks, a row of numbers.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kate said.
WE SAT THE briefcase on the kitchen table, where in the old days it had often lingered. Kate, very calm now, tried Mom’s birthday on the four-number lock. Nope. I tried Dad’s. Nope. Kate tried mine. Nope. I tried Kate’s. And the latches flipped open, familiar snaps.
Maybe I expected blue Yangtze River pearls, rare gold coins, diamonds, too, but Dad really had put all that in Perdhomme’s hands, desperate to pay off whatever mistake it was he’d made, whatever deadly mistake, not even Mr. Bournonville enough. Certainly I expected that manila envelope, stuffed with everything he wanted us to know. But the briefcase was empty, each of its accordion folds empty, nothing in there but the air of another time and a packet of travel tissues, a couple of old receipts. Kate and I shared a long look, incredulous, both of us.
The famous briefcase, empty.
“Oh, Daddy,” Kate said.
“Daddy,” I repeated.
And it was like his spirit flew up in our faces, freed. Or anyway a sudden wind blew back our hair, fluttered the tissues, tossed the receipts, rattled the cabinets: we’d left the patio doors open in our haste, and outside it was getting ready to storm.
Kate shook her head, I shook mine. She chuckled a little. Me, too, ha. Then on cue we burst into hilarious laughter, shouts of laughter, gales of it, laughed till we cried, hooting and snorting with it, laughter funny in itself, laughter redoubled as we locked eyes, locked eyes and laughed till our innards hurt, laughed till we choked, laughed and sputtered and then laughed more. We held one another and laughed together like we hadn’t in forty years.
“Since they died,” I said later.
“Since Dabney died,” my sister corrected.
KATE’S OWN DEATH last fall took us all by surprise. She’d been cheerful, full of life, hyper cheerful, to be sure, several phone calls a day, transcendent plans, soaring dreams, future projects in the thousands. And cheerfully one unseasonably hot morning, after a late breakfast of tortilla chips and avocado dipped directly out of the shell, she told Jack she was going for a run, just that, a run. Maybe a half hour later, he was surprised to see Deep Song floating off its mooring, the sails unfurling in a very fresh wind, Kate at the helm, oblivious of his shouts. Then the note on the kitchen table: It’s time.
The Coast Guard found the boat empty with the spinnaker furled and filled, the tiller tied, old beautiful Deep Song preceding the wind on her own and far out to sea. Kate turned up half buried in sand on the very tip of Long Island, naked except for her necklace, Dad’s golden key.
Her beach is beside an old-school stone breakwater, at the very end of which, and sufficiently under the high tide line that it’s exposed only half the time, Jack has had a deeply molded bronze plaque bolted for the ages. Just one word: KATE. The rest, he felt, was nobody’s business.
THE ARCHIVIST ASSIGNED to the High Side collections turned to Linsey’s cache only recently, all sorts of papers and photos and works of childish art organized and labeled meticulously by Desmond—one didn’t forget Desmond’s handwriting. There were a great many medical records, of course, and the usual birth and baptism certificates and announcements, school notices, but also newspaper files, magazine spreads, stuff his father had kept and later Sylphide, very likely Kate as well, and of course our favorite butler. There were also several dozen large boxes of the boy’s personal effects, organized by dwelling, wherever in the world they’d been. In the High Side stuff the archivist had found a folder of drawings. Linsey hadn’t been a bad draftsman, perhaps a bit of a savant in that regard, endless pretty sketches of smokestacks and willow trees and vintage cars, all with vaginas—fairly innocent vaginas, but vaginas nevertheless. Tucked amongst the drawings (finest watercolor paper) was Dad’s big manila envelope, neatly addressed to Kate, and carefully labeled IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.
The archivist brought it to me at my desk at the foundation office upstairs at the High Side. I held it a long time, Dad’s familiar, long-lost handwriting. He’d meant to install it in his waiting briefcase, no doubt, safely warehoused down in that hidey hole (it could never be seen in our house again), meant to tell Kate where to look. Even desperate, his arrest imminent, he must have thought he had more time. That night I’d seen him sneaking down to the rowboat and over to the High Side, something must have gone wrong. He couldn’t get in the poolhouse, probably, couldn’t find the key (Kate had moved it many times, she admitted, thinking Sylphide spied on her). He didn’t trust Desmond, I knew. Certainly didn’t trust the dancer. And he wasn’t welcome there. Had he come across Linsey? Asked for Linsey? Given the boy the envelope along with strict instructions? Strict instructions the kid would never understand? Had he been that frantic? He mu
st have known that whomever Perdhomme sent would ransack his desk at our house if the worst came down.
I wish Kate could have held out, could have been at my side when I got home that evening. I didn’t even mention the packet to Aamani—too much to explain. While she cooked (magnificent ethnic Tamil dishes, too fiery for most American tastes, sometimes too much for mine), I sat at the very desk, opened the packet in a fever of curiosity, three envelopes inside. The first held the carbon copy of a receipt from Goldberg’s Shoes, the place we always went in Fairfield for my back-to-school loafers, Hyman Goldberg’s clear, triumphant handwriting: One pair hi-cut Chippewa Work Mate work boots size nine. Under that, Daddy’s more cowed script, neat as a schoolmarm’s: IOU (Goldberg) $24.99, dated March 28, 1970, and signed with a flourish. Evocative, maybe, certainly something to puzzle over, those muddy new boots ending up in Kaiser’s rental car, the one whose rear window I’d smashed, but in the end not much help: who was framing whom? Had Brady asked to borrow Dad’s boots on some pretext, planning to leave incriminating prints everywhere he went? And had Dad, wise to him, bought new ones and used them but once—Kate’s painting caper—and then handed them over? And had Brady put them on the day of Dabney’s murder? Kate had come to think so, reimagined it endlessly right to the week of her death, and perhaps here was proof again that she’d been right.
Both brothers, she’d often told me, had their fancy cars, and in the old days often drag-raced one another out on the Merritt Parkway, more than once outrunning cops, bragging rights back at the High Side for whoever had won. Brady’s car was a British model, I’m forgetting which, and that was part of the battle, too: Britain against America. Kate’s theory was that Perdhomme and Brady had cooked up an emergency for Dabney to attend to, something about his money—there’d been urgent phone calls at the High Side all day—possibly, once again, something about Dad, something Dad had supposedly done or was supposedly about to do, something that required a fast, angry drive into New York City, middle of the night, Dad to be stopped, some supposed scheme, Dad as the fall guy.
The younger brother was forever bragging about his skills as a stunt driver, Dabney and the others always making fun. Brother Kaiser, thinks he can drive! Brady would have picked the Den Road Bridge in advance. Its old-school cement bulwark, sharp-edged and brutal, often scarred, was only a yard from the highway pavement. Intercept Dabney, engage him in one last race. Where the bloody hell did you come from! Realization dawning in the famous rocker’s head: Whatever the fuck is going on, Brady is involved. Rage versus rage, the two of them side by side in their hot cars screaming toward Town, as the city was always called, middle of the night, a weekday of no importance, no one else on the highway, Brady nosing ahead of Dabney at the Greenwich line, jerking the wheel at the right moment, terrible clash of fenders, terrible screech of tires, all too late and too fast for Dabney to regain control. Boom!
Brady would have exited right there after the bridge per plan, calmly parked in the commuter lot up there, not a house in sight, would have trotted down to the crashed Mustang to see. He would have found Dabney still alive, and not only alive but conscious, terribly injured, to be sure, these cars with no seatbelts in them. A hero would have rescued the man, and Brady must have seemed the hero, pulling his brother through the passenger window, getting his yellow sweater so bloody in the process that he took it off and tossed it back into the wreck. Since it was crucial to the grand plan that no one find Dabney till he was dead, Brady would have improvised, walked his own brother back into the woods, this skinny man barely ambulatory and bleeding heavily, Brady leaving boot prints to implicate someone else if it ever came to that, to implicate Dad.
And then Brady would have left Dabney by the famous muddy stream, maybe with one last triumphant kick in the ribs, one last jealous curse, and back out alone to the empty parkway, back up to his car, and then on into New York and to Perdhomme to watch the media storm that would follow, attempt to reap the benefits, cold.
IN THE NEXT envelope, there was only a slim box containing a spool of Scotch recording tape from the old Wollensak reel-to-reel Dad had stolen or borrowed from Dolus. The box was taped shut obsessively, and taped to all those layers was a note written in a blind hurry, Dad’s cramped hand:
To whom it may concern: If you are reading this, I am dead. All the evidence you need right here. I am sorry to withhold. Terrified. The voices are 1) me, 2) Mr. Thierry Perdhomme. Recorded from my home phone. As you hear I am not 100% innocent. Still, I did everything I could. To save Dabney, to save everybody. It’s right on the tape. Let it be known that I did all I could to stop them. Let it be known that I wish I’d been able to do one thing more.
He listed ten or so index numbers for the counter on the Wollensak, instances, apparently, where Perdhomme incriminated himself, a couple with exclamation points. And then he’d signed the note with his full name, none of the usual flourish.
I used a paring knife to cut open the tape, mixed feelings. I held the reel in my hands, held it a long time, something you could throw away.
But no.
In the attic, I knew right where to look. The Wollensak was in a cardboard carton along with my old record player, both of them put away when I’d moved to Miami, what I’d thought would be forever, a stack of LPs, too, also a pink radio that had been Kate’s. Finally, bottom of the carton, an empty tape reel. I dug the Wollensak out, propped it on the old costume trunk, snapped the empty reel in place, plugged it into one of the sockets attached to the light fixture in the rafters. The old machine hummed, its little VU meters kicking to life like no time had passed at all. I threaded the tape, fitted the tip of the clear leader into the slot in the takeup reel, gestures I hadn’t forgotten. I pressed the big white PLAY button.
A long, hissing silence.
Then, Mom talking: “What am I supposed to say?”
Dad: “You just talk.”
Me, sounding awfully mature for my years. “I’ll interview you, Mom.”
“About what, life in Westport, Connecticut?”
I put on a reporter voice: “Mrs. Hochmeyer, what does it feel like to have won the club tournament seven years in a row?”
And she put on the voice of the ingénue: “Why, it feels just grand.”
And rubbish like that, tears to my eyes: these lost voices. But more, of course, that Kate’s was not among them.
Then there was our rendition of the Beatles song, Mom and Dad and me, heartfelt—terrible harmonies—memories of the laughter our singing evoked when we played it back, a time when there hadn’t been much laughter. I listened to both sides of the tape, found a little more talk, and then a lot of music recorded off the radio—I’d stayed up half the night goofing with that machine.
Wrong reel, Dad.
AFTER DINNER, LATE, Aamani already in bed, I opened the last envelope from Dad’s packet. Inside was a book he’d given me for my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, a compact little volume for budding outdoorsmen called How to Survive in the Woods. Inside, he’d tucked a couple of photos, images to take with him, no doubt, as he disappeared into the wilds. The first was of himself with Mom on their honeymoon, both of them tanned and ungodly attractive, twenty and twenty-one years old, a picture I’d never seen, the two of them kissing through smiles, his arm foreshortened and enormous as he holds the old Brownie reflex camera out to get the shot.
The second photo made me smile, too: Katy Hochmeyer, about five years old, holding her little brother up by the armpits to see.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful to all my many friends and to my family, none of whom are anything like the people in this book. I got lots of advice and direction and tough love from the writer friends who read the work in various stages along the way: Debora Black, Dana Chevalier, Laura Cowie, Melissa Falcon, David Gessner, Lea Graham, Stephanie Grant, Katherine Heiny, Sonya Huber, Debra Spark, and above all Kristen Keckler, who is a treasure. Warmest gratitude to my editor, Kathy Pories, for her brains and gentle forb
earance, and to everyone at Algonquin, still my dream publisher. And finally, thanks and a medal of honor to Betsy Lerner, my agent, so beautiful to me. And of course to my girls, Juliet and Elysia.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2012 by Bill Roorbach.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-156-2
Life Among Giants Page 36