By midafternoon, with the sun glaring lower in the sky, she went from room to room and pulled some of the curtains and opened others. The apartment was on the ninth floor, offering a commanding view over the lower brownstones of Marlborough and Beacon Street, of the Charles River and Cambridge beyond. Henry took the time to look out, then. Morgan stood beside him, close enough that the smell of her warmed the air.
"I'm going to miss this. When there's a breeze, the seagulls float down from the roof and hang in the air just there, swoop like acrobats, changing places, and look back at me as I watch them, as if they want me to applaud, which I do, of course. I know they can't hear me, but they know I'm here."
With nothing so exciting to tell about his own life, he told her then about the mysterious Helen Mawson and the sealed room. She wanted to hear all about it.
At one point Morgan interrupted, “You see, you don't live such a boring life. You have discovered a tragedy. Perhaps a great tragedy. It sounds like Ibsen."
Henry had never developed a taste for such heavy drama.
He answered with his first thought. “I always wondered why the people in those plays stayed together. I never got to like Ibsen because of it. The Russians may be unhappy, but they have dreams of happiness and pursue their dreams. The Scandinavians are just unhappy, and wallow in it."
She laughed at that.
"Inheritance. They are waiting for their inheritance. The ones who had nothing got up and left and went to America. They were the happy ones. It's just a matter of natural selection, then. The unhappy ones stayed home and waited their turn and bred the next heir in a desperation of boredom."
That comment somehow seemed to be a more negative sort of humor than she used to have. It even sounded a bit like something he might say. It reminded him of the Irish families he had seen at odds with one another at wakes.
"Dad's already told me—when he goes, the house is my sister's. No arguments."
She shrugged. “It's the way it should be. You make a will. It's all settled. No arguments."
He picked on the Scandinavians again. “Of course, now the Scandinavians have ended all that naturally selected unhappiness by having the government confiscate everything when people die so they can redistribute it like good Socialists—now everyone can be unhappy together. No more Ibsens."
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “It's not so different elsewhere. No more Shakespeares,” she said. “No more Mark Twains."
He left the more complicated titles in the library as well as those in the smallest room to the second day. The red scar of a setting sun over Cambridge chilled him. He wanted to stay, to hold her hand against his chest the way he had once done. But this was not what she had asked him to come for. And if he asked, he was sure she would—just because he had. Unfairly.
He kissed her quickly on the cheek and left as she pulled her reading glasses away and stood from paperwork at a desk.
That night his dreams of her fit uncomfortably in the bed with him.
The coffee was ready when he arrived early the next morning. The sun curled in the billow of the curtains shielding open windows. She kissed him again.
That warm impression of her lips was still there through the morning, pulling his mind from his work. He concentrated as best he could, moving from chair to chair around the conference table in the library.
Three low metal filing cabinets were tucked below the center of the conference table at one end. The lack of windows made it unique. With the door closed, all the sound of the world was shut away.
Morgan said, “This was really Heber's room. He spent more time here than anywhere else. The table wasn't for conferences, really. We never had more than two or three people here at a time. It was so he could spread the pages of a manuscript out and look at them all at once. He said it gave him a better sense of a story. He was very good at spotting problems."
She had found a small baked ham and a block of Swiss cheese and cut into the crust of a loaf of French bread for sandwiches at lunch. He was sure she was trying to please him.
She said, “I'm not sorry about the books, really. I am glad to lose them. They've been a weight on me. And the apartment as well. The house on the Cape is my only regret."
Henry knew that loss. The house where he had spent his own summers as a boy was there, at the end of a sandy road in Eastham, and was now long gone—sold—and the memory still fresh.
He said, “That place slows the hours. The Cape gives time itself the feel of passing. It's the sun, I think. You can feel the tilt of it against your skin there."
Morgan said, “Yes!” And the green in her eyes sparked.
He let the thought continue. “And on days when the salt is in the air, it slows your breath as well. Your thoughts spread out wide on the ocean. That little shack I've told you about was on a dune, just high enough to catch the curve of the earth on a clear day. I used to sit there and read my books and let the scenes play out before my eyes, all the way to the horizon."
The spark of her eyes drowned in the darkening of a shallow frown. “Yes. It's so much more like losing the world, to give up all of that, than to lose all of this.” Her eyes searched the walls of books around them.
He turned to her. “Why don't you keep the Cape house, at least?"
He was sorry he had said it. Of course the thought had already hurt her enough.
She looked down. “I can't. There are things that I must take care of."
She spent less time reading that afternoon and stood more at the windows, where he caught sight of her standing in silhouette, still, lost in thoughts he could not know.
The sun was long out of the rooms by the time Henry had finished in the small study off the bedroom. His eyes were tired. He had seldom in his life reached that point when he had looked at too many books, but this was one of those times.
She had come into the room behind him then. He spoke without turning. “I'm afraid I haven't finished. I have a good sense of the collection, but I'd like to check many more of the individual volumes. There are points, you know...."
He was setting the clipboard down on a small stool when he had turned enough to see her bare feet.
Once, inspired by the musk of leaves in the air, and the hard bright light of a cold autumn morning after an auction, she had taken him on a journey to New Hampshire. They had left directly from the hotel in Northampton and driven the old road up the Connecticut River past Greenfield and Brattleboro and across the bridge at Bellows Falls.
Her Jaguar moved quietly and low along the road and never fast. Their passage seemed silent to the point of hearing the leaves stir on the pavement. He never asked her where she was going. He saw the scenery more from her window than his, watching her face in the dapple and splash of the sunlight.
She had told him then about her first memories of childhood, the years late in the war when she and her mother lived near San Diego in a house so small it had only three rooms, including the kitchen, and they had covered one wall with National Geographic maps of the Pacific and tried to guess where her father might be; and of the years afterward spent on military bases in Spain and Turkey, when she had lived in books as the only way to overcome the loneliness; the time at a boarding school in Virginia where the girls spent hours dressing up and talking about their real and imagined boyfriends while she had tried to study her Greek; and then her own discovery of boys at college. Without details, he understood she had fallen in love with a rat and thought her life was ruined until, soon after graduation, she had met Heber Johnson.
"He did not take advantage of me. You must understand. I worked for him for three years before I could get up the courage to tell him I loved him. He was devastated when I said it. I remember he sat down where he was and put his head in his hand. He was balding even then, and it was a sad sight. He did not know how to handle it for weeks.
"He knew his position and what would be thought. But, you see, I knew already that he loved me. He had loved me since the day I had starte
d to work filing correspondence and answering letters. He had hidden it for so long, and I had taken such advantage—such mean advantage of the knowledge. Girls can be so cruel. But in the end, I knew it would be fine, and it was."
Henry recalled now that he had never been uncomfortable the few times she had spoken of Heber. It only seemed a natural part of things as they were.
That day they had driven as far as the Saint-Gaudens museum near Cornish, New Hampshire, and spent the afternoon there walking the grounds and talking amidst the sculpture—talking again about Italy, and Siena, where she had briefly lived and sculpture was a part of everyday life, and about movies, which she did not approve of on the whole.
She had said, “We stand in awe of marble sculpture because it is the truest of arts. A painter can work over his mistake. A writer may change a word used wrongly. But the sculptor cannot take back the blow."
Henry could not find such words to change her opinion of film or convince her that movies were not the beginning of the end of civilization. This was an irony given Heber's success with turning the work of so many of his clients into celluloid.
For the most of that day they were quite alone because it had begun to rain in a slow drizzle, and the enthusiasm of their words fell off into the whisper of dampening leaves, with only stone faces to concur.
That night at an inn run by a woman who was probably the same age as Morgan and had given them a critical eye, they struggled to keep the noisy bed from announcing their every move and had slept little.
Beside the road the next morning, a moist and warm autumn morning with the river overlaid with a bed of mist and creamy light, they had stopped again. They had lain in leaves where a young maple had shed early on a mown field and had made love until a crowd of milk cows had come to investigate. She had raised her bare foot in the air, leg stiff, set against the sky as if sculpted. He stood then, admired its shape and complimented the artist before he kissed her foot, as the cows watched in placid curiosity.
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Chapter Six
Leona Levine did not look like her brother. This left Henry wordless, caught at his father's back door looking down on her as she stood on the top step.
"Henry! I just knew you were over here!"
She stepped up and spread her arms. He had no place else to go when she hugged him. He was thinking about the softness of her body compared to Morgan's as she looked past him into the house.
Behind him were the books from Helen Mawson's room, stacked neatly on a strip of boards laid end to end along the hall, all the way to the front door. This was not the first time his father had indulged him when he needed space for particularly large loads, but it might be the last if he were unable to get them moved soon. The stacks were now organized well-enough for him to begin his research.
"And you brought your books with you,” she said.
She had perhaps grown more buxom, but then she had always been that. Her hair was too black to be in its natural state, though she had not gained more weight than she had always carried well. Leona had been never skinny, even as a little girl. Henry had always thought of her as voluptuous. She still filled a pair of jeans with nothing to spare, only now she wore them low, as was the fashion, and at least six inches below the torn bottom of her sweatshirt, so that he could appreciate a small rose tattoo just where the curve of her hip turned away from the empty belt loops. She had driven him crazy during his high-school years until he had broken his arm.
He finally managed to say hello and ask how she was.
She said, “I'm fine. I just finished with the last of Mom's stuff. Took us all week. I thought I'd take a break and see if you were around. What'cha doin'?’”
Henry shrugged at the obvious. “Sorting books."
She said, “Who'd ever guess? Is your dad here?"
"No. At work..."
She pouted theatrically. “I have something for him."
Leona waited, obviously wanting him to ask.
"What?"
Both of her well-drawn eyebrows arched. “I probably shouldn't tell you. But I will. That is, if you won't tell him I told you."
Henry knew she had every intention of telling him in the first place. His father's van was obviously missing from the open garage.
He tried to cut through the artificial suspense, repeating the word. “What?"
Leona pulled a folded piece of paper from an impossible space in her back pocket.
"A note. Something your dad wrote to my mom—I'd guess about 1979 or ‘80....” Henry's mind froze on the last words. He knew immediately what was coming. He supposed he had always known but had ignored the fact of it. She spoke without taking a breath, her voice slowly rising. “We found it when we were cleaning out her room. In her personal copy of the Torah, no less. You know what it says?” Her eyes had widened further beneath the arched eyebrows.
He raised his own voice. “No. I don't want to know. It's private. It was between them."
Leona tilted her head to the side. She was not going to stop. “They were lovers. Did you know that?"
This was something which had crossed his mind only fleetingly through the years, only to be folded away and purposely forgotten. He resigned himself now to the realization. “I guess. I don't think I wanted to know."
She stepped back and jumped now on the top step, just enough for the wood to squeal beneath her as her bosom rose and fell. He motioned her into the kitchen with the fear of neighbors hearing anything more.
She was squealing now. “Isn't that exciting?"
He could not think of any words to describe it. “I don't think we—"
"Isn't that amazing!” She held her hands out in the air, the note clutched in between two fingers like a specimen. “Your father and my mother were lovers. It's like in a movie. You and me making out in your old Volkswagen minibus while our parents were sleeping together back at home ... Wow!"
Wow? Was that the word to use?
He said, “Yeah ... More like a made-for-television movie, don't you think?"
Leona shook her head back at him, both eyebrows still up.
"I really shouldn't stay. He might come back, and I wouldn't know what to say to him right now."
Henry said, “Don't say anything. It would mortify him."
"Mortified! You should read his note. It's positively steamy."
Her dark eyes gleamed with her found knowledge.
Henry said, “He always wrote well. He was always too shy to speak. He's a very private man. He wouldn't want anyone to know."
She turned her head slowly back and forth, as if Henry did not really understand.
"I was so surprised when I saw him at the funeral. I thought he was just being a good neighbor. Now I understand! Do you realize! If they had gotten married, you would have been my stepbrother. We could have been committing incest!"
Henry was not so sure.
"I don't think it counts the same. But in any case, maybe it would be better if you go. I don't want him to get upset right now. I've dumped all these books in his hall."
Her face fell, as well as her voice. It was back to Lauren Bacall again.
"Maybe you're right .... But it would be nice to see you again. Are you going to be around?"
He answered, “I live in town. That's where I work.” And then thought his voice sounded a bit defensive.
She frowned. “In your apartment? You work in your apartment? Where you live?"
He had to be patient. “Yes."
The bit of skin between her eyes folded even more. “Well, that's why you look a little pale. You ought to get out more. Working at home can be bad for you"—she stepped back and looked at him head to foot—"you know, cardiovascularwise. Do you get any exercise?"
Henry admitted his fault, gladly. “Not much.” Almost pleased that the subject of the conversation had switched from his father to himself. But why did women keep giving him instructions for his health? He felt fine!
Leona strai
ghtened her back in a full display of womanly posture. “I exercise every morning. I go to a health club. Why don't you join a health club? You could even join mine. I could get you a discount."
He said, “I'm busy."
She turned her head slowly in disapproval again. “You need a push. You need someone to get you out of bed in the morning."
He said, “I get out. That's how I find my books."
She pushed. “I mean, to work out. Make your heart pump a little faster."
Henry did not think that was a serious problem. He was admiring the rose on her hip again as she turned toward the door and then stopped.
Over her shoulder he could see a policeman looking through the glass of the door. Leona, turning to Henry, looked down the hall to the front door instead. The doorbell there rang.
Henry reached and opened the back door.
As Henry spoke, he noticed that there was no pleasantness in the officer's facial expression.
Henry spoke first. “What can I help you with, Officer?"
The policeman's face appeared frozen in place. Only the lips moved.
"Are you Henry Sullivan?"
They were there for him. Something had happened.
He said, “Yes, sir. What's wrong? Did something happen to my father?"
Leona backed away toward the kitchen table as the policeman stepped inside.
"No, sir. I don't think so.” Then he looked at Leona. “Could you let the officer in the front door, please?"
Leona popped forward as if wanting the reason to move.
Henry said again, “What's wrong?” His mind raced over possibilities. Was it his sister? “Is Shelagh okay?” His heart was sinking, as if a hole were opening in his middle. He had meant to call her. He had been meaning to speak with her for weeks.
The officer stepped closer to him.
"Who is Shelagh, sir?"
"My sister, Shelagh."
The officer shook his head once. “I don't know, sir. I don't think she's involved."
The policeman who had been at the front door came into the light of the kitchen behind Leona. Leona, looking bewildered, sat down in a chair at the kitchen table for lack of anything else to do.
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