The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Father didn’t have D’Ambrizzi’s easy grace with children. He must have felt moments of jealousy at the crushes Val and I had developed on this exotic specimen. We never thought to wonder why he’d come to stay with us: we were just content to worship him. And then, one day, he was gone, had gone in the night as if we’d made him up, as if he’d been a dream. But he left us each a cross of bone, Val’s filigreed like lace, mine solid and masculine.

  Val still wears hers. Mine is long gone, I suppose.

  Father talked to us about D’Ambrizzi a little later in what for him was a pretty subtle tactic. He didn’t mention D’Ambrizzi’s name, but Val and I exchanged a glance because we knew. Father was explaining to us why we shouldn’t confuse priests—“men of God”—with God Himself. While the one had feet of clay, the other had no known feet at all, not so far as anyone knew. That’s what it boiled down to, though it was quite a long time in the telling. Afterward I can recall sneaking looks at the feet of the priests drinking scotch in the library with Father or marching off to say mass in the chapel for Mother. Never saw any of the clay, and that confused me. Val in her quiet, little-girl way went to work with her jars of modeling compound and produced quite a remarkable rendering. Mother came into the playroom, stopped, did a double take, and asked what those things were. Val piped up, clear and sweet, “Feet of clay!” Mother found that extravagantly amusing and had Father come take a look. Later on she brought a friend from the Church to see them, but Val said she’d scrunched them all up to make something else. I knew it wasn’t true. She’d hidden the feet of clay inside her big bass drum with the clown painted on the side panel. She had pried one of the panels up and used the space inside as her most secret place. It was years before she discovered that I knew about it. I never found a great place like that, but then, I never had any great secrets. Val was the curious one, the one who had stuff to squirrel away.

  I was remembering Val as a little girl, learning to skate on the pond with a kind of natural ease while I floundered around like a fool, cold and wet and bruised and generally irritable. Winter sports always struck me as unhappy pursuits, punishment for unnamed offenses, but Val thought I was a goof.

  And I suppose I was.

  * * *

  I was thinking about Val when Miss Esterbrook, my secretary, came in and cleared her throat behind me. I turned back from the fog and memory.

  “Your sister’s calling, Mr. Driskill.”

  She left and I sat at the desk for a moment before picking up the phone. I do not trust coincidences. “Hello, Val? Where are you? What’s going on?”

  My sister sounded funny and I told her so. She laughed and called me a goof but her heart wasn’t in it. There was something wrong but she said only that she wanted me to get out to Princeton, to meet her at the house that evening. She had something she wanted to talk over with me. I told her I’d thought she was in Paris or someplace.

  “I’ve been all over. It’s a long story. I just got home this afternoon. Flew in with Curtis. Will you come tonight, Ben? It’s important.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m a little scared. Not sick. Ben, let this wait until tonight, okay?”

  “Sure, sure. Is Dad there?”

  “No. He’s got a board meeting in Manhattan—”

  “Good.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just the usual. I like plenty of advance warning if he’s waiting in the shadows to bushwhack me.”

  “Eight-thirty, Ben. And, Ben? I love you, even if you are a big goof.”

  “Earlier today Vinnie Halloran told me I was the Antichrist.”

  “Vinnie always erred on the side of overstatement.”

  “I love you, too, sis. Even if you are a nun.”

  I heard her sigh and then she hung up. I sat for a while trying to remember if I’d ever known her to be afraid before, with the fear seeping into her voice. I decided I never had.

  I left the office a little early for me since my customary day had a tendency to wind down between eight and nine. I wanted time for a shower and a change of clothes before I ransomed my Mercedes for the drive to Princeton.

  The cab dropped me at Seventy-third and Madison. The light had faded behind the fog and the streetlamps were on, glowing their moist penumbrae. I walked toward the park, still trying to figure out what was going on with my sister. The streets were slick and shiny. The World Series had ended just over a week before and suddenly it was cold as winter and the mist was turning to biting little pellets.

  Sister Val … I knew she’d gone to Rome to get started on a new book, had then sent me a postcard from Paris. I hadn’t expected to see her in Princeton until Christmas. She stuck fiercely to her research and writing schedule, yet here she was, taking a break. What had scared her enough to bring her home?

  Well, it looked like I’d be finding out that night. You could never be sure what kind of hell my sister Val was raising. All I knew was that she’d been researching the Church’s role in World War II. Had that brought her home? It was hard to imagine how. But you never knew about Val. She wasn’t the kind of nun we knew at St. Columbkille’s Grammar School. That thought always put a smile on my face and I was grinning like a fool when I got to my brownstone. There wasn’t going to be anything Val and I couldn’t handle. There never had been.

  I crossed the Hudson by way of the George Washington Bridge, headed toward Princeton, and felt the cold and the damp and the tension of my foot on the gas pedal setting off the old ache in my leg, a souvenir of my Jesuit days. The Jesuits had left their mark, all right. The traffic finally thinned out and I was alone with the sweep of the windshield wipers and the Elgar cello concerto coming from the tape player. It had become a foul, slippery night, the rain turning to a slushy half-ice, the car always on the verge of aquaplaning me into the next world.

  I was thinking of another night rather like it, twenty-odd years before, only then it was the utter dead of winter and white not dirty gray, but there had been the same feeling of things out of kilter. I’d been heading back to Princeton then, too, dreading the talk I was facing with my father. I didn’t want to tell him what had happened and he certainly didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t much for sob stories and failures, which in his view were always nothing but goddamn cowardice. The closer I got to Princeton the more I wanted no part of it. There I was, in the middle of what Bulwer-Lytton might have called a dark and stormy night, ice and snow sealing me off, running like a thief in the night from the gloomy, crenellated battlements where I’d tried to be a Jesuit. Tried to be the man my father had always wanted me to be.

  Hugh Driskill liked the idea of my being among the Jesuits, liked knowing I was entwined in the rigorous discipline, the demanding intellectual life. He liked knowing I was taking my place in a world that he understood. It was also a world that my father felt he could control to some extent. He liked to believe in his own egocentric way that he, because of his wealth and devotion to the Church and the accomplishing of good works and the wielding of influence—he liked to believe that in the end he was one of those who defined the Establishment, the Church within the Church. I always felt that my father rated himself rather too highly but, hell, what did I know?

  More recently it has occurred to me that he may have had a pretty accurate view of himself after all. Drew Summerhays had confided a few things to me over the years that tended to legitimize my father’s belief in his own importance. Summerhays had long been a mentor and friend to my father in much the same way my father was to the ubiquitous Curtis Lockhardt. And now Summerhays was telling me that my father and Lockhardt were laying plans for the choosing of the next pope.

  Of course I remembered things from my own life that lent weight to my father’s view of himself. When I was a kid, Cardinal Spellman—he must have been bishop or archbishop then, who remembers?—was always coming over from New York to Princeton for dinner, which must have meant we were something special. He came to both the Princeton
house and the very grand Park Avenue duplex which we gave up after Mother’s accident. Sometimes I heard my parents calling him “Frank,” and once I marveled when he told me he was wearing alligator shoes. Perhaps I’d been inspecting him for feet of clay.

  It must have been the call from Val that had gotten me worrying and thinking about the old days, and now I was remembering Spellman and my father and alligator shoes and the Jesuits and that long-ago night when the road was slippery and the snow was blowing and I was driving home alone with a load of bad news, wondering what my father would say, wondering how he’d confront the newest disappointment I’d devised for him.

  Twenty years ago, more.

  In the early morning, when the snow had almost stopped and dark of night had eased up a bit, the highway patrol had gone looking for victims of the storm. They found my Chevy racked up against a tree, totaled, the car and the tree and damn near me, and there was no evidence I’d tried to stop the car on the icy, crusty, snowy road. So they knew I must have fallen asleep. It happened sometimes. Well, that was all bullshit. I had a broken leg and I was half frozen, but the important thing was that I’d realized in the middle of the night that dying was preferable to telling my father about the Jesuits and me.

  Epiphany. It was the only true moment of epiphany I’d ever had. Naturally, as it developed, my father knew the truth of what I’d tried to do that night. It was there in his eyes, the burning fires of unquenched despair, like beacon fires on a dark and treacherous shore beckoning me home, home. He knew. He knew I’d had my go at suicide, the final Catholic sin, and it was one more thing he could never forgive.

  Thank God there’s Val. He actually said it to me in the hospital afterward. Not to insult me, nor to humiliate me, but just muttering to himself under his breath. And by then, having consciously tried to end my own life, having once chosen the void, having excluded my father from the decision-making process, I no longer gave a goddamn what he thought. That was what I told myself. That was my triumph.

  * * *

  I skirted the edges of Princeton, turned off onto the two-lane blacktop where I’d learned to drive my father’s Lincoln, and before I knew it the headlights were poking through the whipping curtain of rain and sleet, reaching into the darkness toward the house. The long driveway passing beneath and between rows of poplars was soft with slush sucking at the tires. The gravel turnaround was yellow and muddy, the rosebushes forlorn, as if no one had been home this century. The low gable-roofed stone garage sat glum and dark on one side of the forecourt. No one had turned on the welcoming coach lanterns to light my arrival. The house itself stretched out to the left, the fieldstones glistening in the headlights like pebbles at the bottom of a streambed. The house was dark and the night was black, impenetrable, soaked. In the distance the glow of Princeton wavered pink in the rain over the treetops.

  Entering the darkened front hall sent a chill rattling along my backbone. But when I flipped the switch the lights came on and everything was as it always was, the polished oak floor, pegged not nailed, and the cream molding and staircase, the olive-green walls, the gilt-framed mirrors. I went directly to the Long Room, the two steps up from the foyer, where we seemed to do most of our gathering when we returned home.

  The Long Room. It had once been the main public room of the original eighteenth-century inn around which the rest of the house had been built, as was still evident from the blackened beams overhead, the scarred and scorched fireplace six feet high and ten wide, the pot hooks. But it had picked up bits and pieces over the years: the flowered slipcovers, the walls of bookcases, the enormous hooked rugs of mustard and scarlet, the coal scuttle, the mustard leather wing chairs drawn up around the stone fireplace, the yellow-shaded brass lamps, the bowls and copper pots of flowers, and at the far end of the room looking out toward the orchard and the creek, the easel where my father did some of his painting. The current canvas was large and covered with a dropcloth.

  It was cold in the room, the damp chill seeping in from outside. The ashes in the grate were dead and damp and smelled like autumn with rain dripping down the chimney turning them to mud. In the old days William and Mary lived in their own quarters and would have been bustling around, stoking the fires, greeting me with a toddy, bringing the place to life. But now William was dead, Mary had gone into retirement in Scottsdale, and the couple who served my father lived in Princeton, not in the rooms over the east wing.

  I knew she wasn’t there. I called her name anyway, just for the company of the sound, and it died away in the silence. I went to the foot of one of the several staircases scattered about the place and called her name again. I heard the old scampering sound from above, like dry newspapers blowing along a gutter. The cold and rain had driven the field mice inside from under the eaves and now they were running around trying to remember where they were, which was where countless generations of their ancestors had been before them.

  When we were kids Val and I had decided that the noises we heard in the walls were made by the ghost whose story we seemed to have heard at birth. He was a boy, the tale went, who had killed an English officer behind their lines and made his escape with a couple of redcoats in hot pursuit. An earlier Ben Driskill had hidden him in one of the attics, but after a week the British search party came to the Driskill holdings and searched the house. They found the boy cowering in the darkness, half dead from pneumonia, and declared him guilty on the spot. They told this long-ago Ben Driskill they were going to hang him with the boy, an object lesson for the countryside, which prompted Ben’s wife, Hannah, to appear in the doorway with a blunderbuss and the promise to put a couple of ounces of sudden death into that redcoat’s breadbasket if he didn’t satisfy himself with the one prisoner and beat it. The Brit bowed, suggested that henceforth Ben should think twice before giving aid and comfort to an enemy of Good King George, and stalked off with the killer in tow. They took the lad to the orchard and hanged him with a length of Driskill rope from a stout Driskill apple tree, from which Ben cut him down shortly thereafter and buried him beneath the tree. His grave was still marked and we used to play out there. And we listened with wide-eyed fascination to the story of this brave rebel’s death and ghost.

  I climbed the stairs now and waited but nobody—not a ghost, not a squirrel, not my sister—was going to answer me. I thought of my mother in one of her flowing nightgowns and lacy robes standing in the hallway, her hand out as if she were trying to reach me from far away. How long ago had that happened? Her lips forming words which I must have heard then but could no longer recall … Why couldn’t I remember what she’d said while I could recall exactly the scent of her cologne and powder? And why was her face lost in the shadows of the hall? Was she young? Or was she gray? How old had I been when she’d come forward, hand out, saying something, trying to make me understand something?

  I went back downstairs, took an umbrella, went outside. The rain was blowing sideways in the ghostly glow of the coach lights. I pulled the trench-coat collar up and went to the little underpass between two wings of the house and ducked underneath. The rain rattled on the mullioned windows above and in the lead gutters, spewed out furiously, slowly turning to ice that would build up and eventually block the drainpipe. Some things just never changed.

  I set off across the lawn where we used to play croquet and badminton. The lights from the windows of the Long Room cast yellow fingers pointing the way toward the chapel.

  We had our own chapel, of course. My father’s father had built it in the twenties to satisfy one of my grandmother’s whims of iron. It was “of the period,” as they say in guidebooks, brick and stone and black and white trim with what my grandmother used to call “a very nice steeple, not too proud of itself,” which was always in need of repair. We weren’t English Catholics like Evelyn Waugh’s and we didn’t keep a tame priest of our own on the family payroll, but we pretty much supported those who served at St. Mary’s in the nearby village of New Prudence. Growing up, I thought that having you
r own church was insane but I learned to shut up about it. When I went to the St. Augustine School, having your own chapel didn’t seem quite so preposterous. Some other kids were in the same boat.

  Now the chapel was dripping in the rain like something you’d find in an old English churchyard, in a poem. It was dark and dreary and full of mice. The grass needed cutting. It was lacquered over with a thin coating of ice. I grabbed the handrail and climbed the steps to the iron-bound oaken door. The ring handle squeaked slightly when I gave it a tug. A single candle guttered in the rush of air from the doorway. One little candle. The chapel was utterly black beyond the halo of light, almost as if it were just emptiness. Still, Val must have been there to light the candle. And then she’d gone off somewhere.

  I went back to the house, turned off the lights. I couldn’t bear the idea of making myself at home in that cold house without Val. It wasn’t like her to leave me hanging. But it was a rotten night and she may have had errands and gotten slowed down somewhere. She’d show up later.

  I was hungry and needed a drink. I got into the car and took one look back at the lonely old house in the pelting rain, and drove in to Princeton.

  There was a pleasant buzz of conversation in the downstairs taproom of the Nassau Inn. The bar was crowded. There was a haze of smoke, the faint air of clubbiness that clings to the name if not to the actual place itself. There were the framed photographs of Hoby Baker and other heroes of another age, the deep carvings of generations of Tigers in the tops of the tables. The smoky haze might have been the mists of time.

  I sank into a booth and ordered a double dry Rob Roy and realized how tense I was. It was Val and the fear in her voice, and now where was she? She’d been so insistent, and now nothing. Had she put a match to that single candle?