by Amanda Cross
“Do thefts still go on?”
“Oh yes. There are often insiders helping thieves, selling information about security systems or helping the criminals to get in after hours, or to stay after hours. Labor is expensive, and guard jobs are boring. Often most of the guards in a museum aren’t on the museum’s staff at all, or only a few of them are, and these are not highly paid. The greater number of guards are hired from ‘cops for rent’ or some such organization. Does any of this help?”
“Yes, it does. I can’t tell you exactly why, at least not yet, but I can say that what you have told me is important for one main reason: there is a distinction between art theft for profit and art theft in the service of a particular passion. Knowing that is important to me.”
“If you say so, Kate. As long as the particular passion doesn’t include destroying the picture, as with the Rembrandt.” Selma rose and picked up the coffee cups. “Is cheese and bread and salad sufficient for lunch, or shall we go out and celebrate this reunion with something special?” she asked.
“Might we do the something special for dinner? Bread and cheese is a favorite of mine.”
“So I remembered. Crusty, fresh French bread, Brie, and Stilton.”
“What a memory you have.”
“You came to my house only once before I moved to Boston, and that was what I had. You liked it.”
“Perhaps we could visit your museum,” Kate said, embarrassed as always to hear herself complimented, even by implication. “I’m not much on museums, or art if it comes to that—too visual I guess—but there is an intense pleasure in viewing museum pictures in the company of an informed guide.”
“So you shall.”
“Good,” Kate said. “It has been, and promises to continue to be, a lovely day. I’m glad I decided to stay for all of it.”
“Me, too,” Selma said.
And Kate promised herself to return one day soon to tell Selma the reasons for her inquiries. Today, Kate needed to speak of other things.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
As it turned out, Kate had to wait an hour in the airport. The shuttle flight she had planned to take, in time for which Selma had dropped her off, had been canceled, ostensibly for mechanical problems; actually, Kate had no doubt, because there was an insufficient number of passengers. Airplane travel in the United States had become an experience similar to what Kate had heard of the Army: hurry up, wait, face frustration as a way of life.
Yet she was not sorry to sit in the airport—alas it was not quiet; the blaring of television could not be escaped, but by putting in ear plugs, which she always carried when traveling by air, she was able to mute the sound and, as Virginia Woolf put it, let herself down into her mind.
She had not told Selma about Jay, or that she had discovered the truth about who her father was. Only to Leslie had she been able to speak of this event, and she would probably not be able to discuss it even with Leslie today. Selma and Kate had spoken of families, of memories, of loyalty—was it owed to one’s near relations, and if so, why, and how much? Kate’s contemporaries, including Leslie, had mentioned the lack of attention offered by one’s grown children, except in a crisis or if requested, but Leslie was ready enough to concede that one’s own lack of deep affection for one’s mother hardly suggested the broadest scope of filial attention. Leslie considered herself to have been a better mother than her own mother had been, but surely all mothers thought that.
Selma, now nearing forty, had with her husband decided against having children. As she explained to Kate, she had neither respect nor love for her parents, why continue the pattern? She did not particularly like children—nor did Kate, particularly—and surely one could feel free to choose wisely in the matter of giving birth to them. They both agreed that the pressure to choose motherhood was powerful, but it was avoidable if one knew one’s own mind.
“Which many don’t,” Kate had said. “Or, at a relatively late age, they decide that something vital will be missed. They long to give birth; they do not consider the guilt, the anxiety, the responsibility, the sense of betrayal that may lie ahead and often does.”
“My parents,” Selma had answered, “who treated us children as impostors, particularly me and my sister because we were not boys, would never have admitted to not wanting children.”
“I expect being rich made a difference in my family’s case,” Kate had said. “One had built-in child care; there was no need to arrange for it constantly in a world ill-adapted to the concept of child care.”
“And you were the first girl, with three older brothers. You must have been very welcome.”
And Kate thought now, sitting in the airport, that she had been welcome, by her father as welcoming as he could be because she was a girl, by her mother because she was the child of passion. Why had she, Kate, never thought about this? Indeed, how little she had thought of during all those years except her determination to get along in the present and escape in the future into a different world, a world of ideas, and intellect, and poetry; it had been poetry she had relished as a youngster. Perhaps the reason she could not describe anyone, did not register the looks or clothing or body of those she encountered, was that she had not only failed to do this as a child, but had learned not to let such impressions in, only to tolerate and, as far as possible, ignore them.
Jay’s appearance (an odd word to choose, she thought, since she did not mean appearance in that sense, she meant emergence, manifestation) had somehow thrust her back into that world of nonobservance. Might she not have noticed something odd, something not quite ordinary, had she looked about her? Was there the residue of passion to be detected, the sense of not belonging to be questioned, her differences from her brothers, looks apart, to be inferred? True, she had turned out not to notice appearances, but had she, on the other hand, turned to detection, or been enticed into it? Was that the result of a dormant sense of something wrong, something hidden?
And so she mused, until the next plane was ready, its wish to welcome passengers announced with sham apologies for the delay. Kate boarded, and managed to quell her introspections and pay attention to the book she had brought for reading on the plane. It demanded her attention and she received it; unlike most travelers, Kate did not prefer light reading on planes; light reading, she liked to admit to Reed, was what she enjoyed when she was pleasantly tired, or ought unquestioningly to be doing something else.
The flight was quick, as shuttle flights always were. Kate headed for the taxi line, to be intercepted by Reed, who had called Selma to ask what plane Kate would be on.
“But you must have had to wait an hour,” Kate said, covering her delight at seeing him.
“One always expects to wait at airports; surely you’ve noticed that.”
“I’m beginning to think there is far too much I have never noticed,” Kate said. “You have left Jay alone.”
“At his urging. He talked to me; he wants to talk to you. And I have come up with the beginnings of a plan. But that can wait until we are home. Let’s get a taxi.”
“Do you think the taxi driver presents a danger if we talk in his cab?” Kate asked, laughing.
“I’m taking no chances. I’m glad you’re back. But I warn you; I think Jay wants to continue his discussion with you about love. You know, in connection with that movie Brief Encounter.”
“I fear the man’s a bloody romantic,” Kate said.
“Of course he is; surely you’ve figured that out by now.”
When Kate, back home, looked in on Jay he was lying on the cot almost as she had left him. But now he was awake.
“Reed tells me you want to talk about love,” she said.
“Just to finish that conversation.”
“You were calling me a cynic.”
“As I remember,” Kate said, “you were saying that, like that man in the film, you had promised to love all your life. You believe in lifelong love.”
“And you said they could promise lifelong love because they would never see each other again. The remark of a cynic.”
“I’m not the least cynical. I don’t think any couple who live together go on loving in the same way. They love, but differently; the love grows, and changes, and, above all, becomes familiar. Life isn’t a movie, Jay.”
“You are your mother’s daughter; that was more or less her point of view.”
“Is that what she said when she refused to run off with you?”
“Not exactly. I don’t think she would have claimed for a single minute that she had ever loved Fansler, or ever would. But she refused to believe that love could last in the face of too little money and no social life.”
“You’re still angry that she didn’t run off, after all these years.” It was unclear if this was a statement or a question.
“She wouldn’t, in the end, give up her social life, which I found empty and silly and so, I’m sure, did she. But she was certain that love couldn’t protect you from isolation and the lack of her kind of familiar social events, no chance to welcome people into your home and treat them graciously.”
“She did have three sons.”
“She’d have left them in a minute, believe me. She’d have left Fansler. What she couldn’t leave was the life she had—the life money could buy and old acquaintances could fill. We would have taken you with us. You would have been enough future for her; she didn’t need the three sons.”
“Have you ever thought—forgive me if this sounds unkind—that your love might not have endured if you had remained together all your life?”
“You think it has endured because I lost it?”
“I only ask.”
“How can I answer that, Kate? I’ve had a whole other life. I’ve had a wife and stepsons and a satisfactory profession.”
“With just a taste of crime to season it. Sorry, that was unkind and unnecessary.”
“I gather you don’t know much about art theft.”
“I know more than I did when last we met; I’ve learned that stealing art for reasons other than profit is safest for the thief but not always for the art.”
Jay appeared to ignore this. “I have odd, I suppose dated, ideas of love and truth and honor,” he said. “I believed, and still believe, that if you love someone, you cling to them. If you learn that a beloved object has been stolen and sold, you help to recover it. If you know someone who has murdered and who you suspect will murder again, you speak out against him. The conclusions of a romantic, you will say, and you are right. It is that romantic strain, what’s more, that has brought me here, to your home, to endanger you and your husband.”
“Reed has some thoughts about that; he’s going to tell me what they are; then, if I agree, he’ll tell you.”
“Whatever his thoughts, I’m not going to stay here after today. I’ve decided. I wanted to meet you before I died, and then, again in danger of being killed, I ran to you. You’ve every right to call it romantic. Except that scientists, evolutionists, are telling us today that it’s our genes that matter to us, the search for immortality in our offspring. Perhaps that is what seemed to urge me to find you: onward with my genes.”
“Not too onward; as you now know, I have no children. The last of my line, if that matters. I can’t say the thought of my genes, such as they are, ending here, has ever troubled me. As it happens, I spoke with the friend I was visiting in Boston about people like her, like me, who do not feel that almost universal longing for children. I hope you were not searching for immortality in your progeny when you set out to find me.”
“No. I’m a different sort of romantic. Evolution is a fascinating subject, but not one, in my view, to be taken seriously. Genes aren’t passed on like a baton in a relay race. Had you had children, they might have got the genes of someone generations, even centuries back. It was you I wanted to find, Kate, not anyone beyond you.”
When Reed and Kate sat down to confer about their situation, which seemed to Kate to grow tenser with each day and to become, each day, no nearer to a solution, Reed delivered the news of his discoveries.
“I hired a very pricey detective who works in the area of Jay’s home town,” Reed said. “I learned a number of facts about his origins. They’re intriguing facts but hardly useful ones. What it amounts to in summary is this: Jay—which we might as well go on calling him—was born—”
“What do you mean,” Kate interrupted, “by saying you ‘learned a number of facts’? You just make a phone call and someone scurries around and behold, you know all about whomever you care to investigate?”
“More or less,” Reed said. “There is no privacy in today’s world; it is best to accept that fact. We needn’t approve of it, or welcome it, but privacy as we knew it is a thing of the past. Between the Web and a good private inquiry agent there’s little that can’t be discovered about someone, from birth to death, and including one’s financial and medical history among other things.”
“That’s a horrible thought,” Kate said.
“I agree. Someday something may be done about it; a code may be developed that is impenetrable. But there has never been a code that couldn’t be broken, sooner or later. For the moment, however, perhaps we better deal with the problem immediately before us.”
Kate sighed and nodded. “What I discovered,” Reed continued, “is that Jay’s real name, his birth name, is Edmund M. Dyson, which is the name under which he went to Yale’s architecture school, and the name he used when he was forming the firm that he is still a partner in, though an inactive one.”
“But wasn’t he afraid my mother or someone might find him if he used his real name, the name she knew him by?”
“You forget, my dear. Your mother had no desire to find him; the other Fanslers didn’t know of his existence.”
“And what of Jay Ebenezer Smith?” Kate asked.
“That is the name, or close to the name (we may never know exactly how the Witness Protection Program deals with these matters) under which he hid out and entered into a new life.”
“So Ebenezer had nothing to do with his parents’ love of Dickens?”
“Yes, it did, oddly enough. His mother died when he was a young child; his father was a hard-working accountant who lived either for figures or Dickens, whose novels he read and reread all his life. No doubt, when not reading Dickens, he did his best for his son after his wife’s death.”
“How on earth did your pricey detective find all that out?”
“Not hard. Jay’s father worked as an accountant and was a member of a Dickens’ society. He seems to have had no other interests except, one hopes, Jay. He did, at any rate, attend PTA meetings at Jay’s school.”
Kate stared at Reed.
“Well,” Reed said, “it is a little more complicated than I was going to bother you with right now; time presses. I promise, you would have eventually had every tiny detail if and when you wanted it. When Jay married, which he did while in the Witness Protection Program, he showed his new wife and her sons the papers and materials of any sort he had been allowed to take with him into his new life; no photographs were allowed, for obvious reasons. The papers he was allowed to keep were his father’s, from which all those with names had been removed. These papers bore ample evidence of the father’s interests and work. The detective I hired visited the sons of Jay’s wife, now dead, and was shown those papers. The sons, by the way, know now that Jay was in the Witness Protection Program when he lived with them, and that he took a different name when he left the program. They have seen him since; I gather theirs is a cordial relationship, not that that matters as far as we are concerned.”
“Why did he use his made-up name when he met us?”
“You’ll have to ask him. But there’s no dou
bt the Ebenezer was a nod to his father’s memory. It’s true, by the way, as he told you the first time you met, that his mother drank. She was an alcoholic who killed herself and Jay’s older brother; that was in the police records; she was driving while intoxicated. Like many children of alcoholics, even ones who did not kill themselves or anybody else, Jay has never been a drinker, at least as far as records show.”
“And as we mentioned before,” Kate said, “he might have chosen Ebenezer because Scrooge reformed. I somehow think the whole question of reformation has always been on his mind.”
“True, no doubt. But it hardly helps us to decide what to do about him now.”
“I’m working on that,” Reed said. “Pondering and planning. Will you wait until tomorrow to hear my proposal?”
“You are remembering that Clara comes on Tuesday.”
“Ah, yes. I meant to ask you if we might not, this once, postpone Clara to a later day in the week, or cancel this week. Since we have never canceled her before, I think a postponement is preferable. Will you call her or shall I?”
“I’ll call her,” Kate said.
Kate was torn between insisting that Reed tell her his plans this very moment and the knowledge that she had classes tomorrow as well as other preparations that could hardly wait. She was, in addition, scheduled tomorrow to attend a lecture by a visiting Shakespearean scholar whose work she ought to at least review in her mind, however sketchily.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You know my father hath no child but I,
Nor more is like to have.
Kate did not attend all the lectures sponsored by her department, nor even a majority of them. She had, however, read the works of this speaker, and admired particularly his book on what he called “Shakespeare’s comedies of forgiveness.” These were Shakespeare’s late plays; they were often violent in action and complicated in plot; they were not among his most popular or most frequently performed works, and yet they held a particular fascination for certain critics of Shakespeare, among whom today’s lecturer was prominent.