Auguste Dinant’s nephew landed them right on the beach; it was about the most romantic thing Eleanor could think of.
So here she was, on the beach at Calais, thinking of Mary Queen of Scots, listening to the Angelus bell from the convent, its gray Gothic hulk perched on its island hog’s back, high and dry in a sea of sand with the tide out. Down the beach, a brood of nurses pushed war amputees in wheelchairs on the rough wooden boardwalk that wandered the beach below the rubble breakwater. The sea crashed and boiled, rank after rank of heaving whitecaps thrown up by the crosswinds. David had started a small bonfire, feeding it with driftwood. They’d had a rough lunch and he’d given her an exquisite miniature copy of Shelley’s complete poems.
“I found it at Knapp’s,” he said. “I hope you like it, Eleanor. Look, the endpapers …”
She opened the small book; it was beautifully bound. She looked over at David and gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek.
“Would it be all right if I kissed you back?”
She slipped the book into her pocket. “I would like that,” she said.
He stepped close, his eyes closed. Eleanor blinked behind her thick spectacles to keep him in focus, closing her eyes only at the last moment.
They walked, arm in arm, watched by a regiment of high-stepping gulls milling at their feet, digesting a beached fish. “Sometime, maybe this spring, when the weather’s broken, I know a place,” he was saying. “It’s a cathedral town, very beautiful. We might go there.”
Eleanor let the offer settle for a few steps. “Which cathedral?”
“The cathedral of St-Étienne, at Auxerre.”
It meant nothing to her. “Why does a Jewish man with his nose buried in French dictionaries want to see an old cathedral?”
“It’s not just any old cathedral, Ellie. It was started the year of the Magna Carta. And not an hour away is another beauty, the cathedral at Vézelay. And any man with an eye in his head knows beauty when he sees it, no matter what inspired the beauty.”
“You’re flirting again.”
“As a matter of fact, I am.” He kissed her briefly. “It’s something beautiful I want you to see.” “With you.”
“Yes. With me.”
“All the way to Nivernois. That’s where Auxerre is, am I right?” They walked in silence. “I’m no expert on the French rail system, but that’s a good eighty kilometers.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And Vézelay is beyond Auxerre, if I remember my map of France correctly.”
“Also true.”
She stopped. “Mr. Barenberg, are you asking me to spend the night with you in Auxerre?”
His face shone with anxiety. “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”
She let go his arm. “Well, Mr. Barenberg, I suggest you go for a walk while I think this over,” she said in what Allen once called her schoolmarm voice.
“Ah,” he said, retreating a little. “I’ll perhaps take a look at those dunes.”
“You do that.”
Eleanor watched David circle behind the dunes. She turned and eyed the gulls, racing inland as the seas rose, replete with hake. She brushed the crinkly hair from her eyes and, to her shock, found herself remembering Foster and his friends at the cottage, naked, splashing in the lake beneath the light of a July half-moon, their appendages—Aunt Eleanor’s word—comically adrift between their thighs as they ran in the thigh-deep waves.
The memory drifted, merging with crabbed, forbidden thoughts of David’s pale, round body, thickset and broad-backed, to a whitewashed room, a closed door, a duvet, closeness. Eleanor let herself smile: the tension was to her liking, a knot gathering itself below her belly, tightening all the way to her heart.
She heard a shout, blurred by the wind. David stood atop the biggest dune near the path off the beach, waving both hands, the threads of his thinning hair trailing away in the breeze. He was calling something. She turned to listen.
“I love you,” he was shouting into the wind.
She waved back and cleared her throat.
“Yes!”
He stopped waving, puzzled.
She cupped her hands to her lips and shouted back: “I’ll go with you to Auxerre!”
He threw his hat in the air. The homburg spun away, rising in the stiff wind, a punctuation mark against the white sky.
IX
HENDERSON HARBOR
MIDSUMMER 1928
The sun over Henderson Harbor quarreled with a massive cumulus cloud, casting a massive shadow, paving a blue-black road from the horizon to the sunlit shore. Eleanor stood at the helm of her new boat, waiting for the wind to gather itself, planning her tack home. She pulled her hair from her eyes and waved to the shore. Several figures on the cottage balcony, smudges in the sun, waved back at her. David, in shirtsleeves and linen pants, trailed a hand over the side, a book face down in his lap.
“You and your family have a special love of the water, don’t you?”
Eleanor laughed. “I’m a water rat from way back.”
David caught her amusement and smiled. “You’re different out here, more relaxed. Pétillante, the French would say.”
“What’s that?”
“Sparkling, bubbly. Like champagne.”
“Well, isn’t that the sweetest thing to say to a woman at the helm.”
David turned his book over and fished out a slip of paper from between the pages. “There’s a letter stuck in chapter three of your Gatsby.”
“Oh, that. I’d forgotten. Is it from Grace?”
David folded the letter without reading it. “It is indeed. You tell me she writes a passionate, amusing letter. I didn’t know she drew.”
“Crow quill. She’s getting better, isn’t she? See the one of the Medici fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens?”
“Very fine, indeed. Still close, you two?”
“By letter, we are. She’s a rare bird, Grace. Had a hard time during the war. She lost someone very close.”
“Of course, of course. I’d forgotten you were in France together. We should look her up next time we’re in New York. See if she’s still a live wire. We could all use a good time.”
Eleanor glanced at the sky, scrutinizing the distant clouds. “Are you having a good time, David?”
“Your brothers—I make them nervous. Allen’s curious and distant, like a good diplomat should be. But Foster’s not even curious. He hasn’t said a word beyond ‘good morning.’ And that’s like pulling teeth.”
“Foster’s not one for small talk. He’s not built that way.” She was perspiring, her spectacles sliding down her nose. She pushed them back up with her forefinger. “Why? What are you getting at?”
“Eleanor.” He was staring at her now through the sunglasses he’d borrowed from Allen.
“What?” She paused, irritated. “What? No. You can’t mean—”
He closed the novel. “Eleanor. It’s obvious. I make Foster uncomfortable. If I were rich and blond and gentile and had a boat, well, I think he’d stop hanging on to his drink like it was going to jump out of his hand when I talk to him.”
“Foster’s a very reserved man. I tell him regularly what a stuffed shirt he is.”
An osprey dove, skimming the wave tops, came right at the boat, only feet away, then screamed off to stern.
He shook his head again. “Has Foster ever actually spoken to a poor person?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
David allowed himself a small smile. “You’ve just answered it yourself, dear. As I thought.”
“Just because Foster works on Wall Street, that doesn’t make him uncaring.”
David stood and shuffled to the bench near the helm. “You know how hard life is for the factory workers, the hours, the sheer toil,” he said, sitting. “I know. I didn’t get to Johns Hopkins on my father’s name.”
“What on earth does this have to do with Foster?”
“Surely you know the game. You want to be a policeman or
a politician, join the Masons. You want to be a Wall Street lawyer, go to an Ivy League law school. You want to be secretary of state, it helps if you have one or two in the family. If you’re a Jew? You know about the quotas as well as I do.”
“You’re jealous, David, that it? Or just being competitive? Or is it just the heat?”
He’d leant forward, hands clasped between his knees. “America’s supposed to be far less class-bound than England or even France. But it’s not.”
“Hang on, I’m coming about. The wind’s up. It’s shifting. Watch your head when the boom swings.”
“Foster is in harness to the most powerful families in America, but he’s no aristocrat, any more than I am. You see, I’ve been thinking for the week we’ve been here, dear.”
“Evidently.”
“But he can’t see what we have in common,” David said, his voice tightening. “He’s an utter pragmatist. What’s the value of my work in his world? Less than nothing. He’s got his sights set somewhere over my head. That’s the simple truth, Eleanor: he can’t see me.”
“For goodness’ sake, David. Foster sees the world for what it is.” Eleanor let the boat run now, full in the gathering afternoon wind. “Surely you see Foster’s an intellectual too.”
David laughed, just hard enough to be heard over the clap of the waves against the hull and the throbbing sails. “Eleanor, there isn’t a salon in Paris or a club in London or New York that’d call Foster Dulles an intellectual. Look, he’s a lawyer who does business deals. Deals that lead to other deals, bigger all the time. That takes great cunning, great thoroughness. Not intellect. There’s a difference.”
Eleanor snapped him a harsh look. “That’s unfair, and you must take it back.”
“Dear, it’s true and I mean it as a compliment. He’s a trust lawyer, Ellie—maybe the best in the country. He helps the rich get richer, the big cartels get bigger. I read the newspapers. They say he’s the man who’s going to save Germany with Wall Street money. He’s already moved tens of millions of dollars into Germany, and from what I hear there’ll be many millions more.”
“Foster is going to be secretary of state someday.”
He rose and kissed her on the cheek. “And that ambition’s never, ever crossed your mind?”
“Oh, David, get your head out of the clouds. And don’t do that,” Eleanor snapped, shrugging him off. “I’m trying to talk to you and sail at the same time.”
David moved back to the bench, leaning his back against the gunwale, relaxed, bemused. He beamed at her. “You hate being told what to do, dear. There’s a world of difference.”
She shook her head. “Last time we talked, you said we’re at our best together, being different.”
“Which is another way of saying you like to win arguments, Ellie.”
“I think I just did.”
They both smiled. Eleanor stepped away from the tiller and kissed him. “Do you ever think about Auxerre?”
“Of course. It was wonderful, unforgettable. The way the radiator clanged and thumped, like a living thing. And that coffee.”
Eleanor gave a wry nod. “Then we broke up two weeks later.”
“And made up the week after that. It’s our pattern, dear.”
Eleanor laughed. “It is. I love you, David.”
“I love you, too, darling.”
They kissed again, then sat quietly together. For a few minutes there was nothing but the hum of the wind in the sails and the lapping of the waves between them. Ahead, the shore slid sideways, pendulum-like, as Eleanor tacked inland.
“Do you often think of him?” she asked. She turned into him; his arm came around her waist, close.
He gazed away now, his face set. “Hardly a day goes by.” He was clearly thinking about it, his forehead taut. “A very clever boy, a good boy, they tell me.”
They were close to half a mile offshore now; the breeze died. She fixed him with a quiet stare. “I want a child, David.”
“Darling, I want to have a child with you, more than anything. But you know I couldn’t support us. I have a hundred and twelve dollars in this world, dear. I can’t afford to do many things, not least visit Palestine and see my child. That keeps me awake nights.”
“I know it does, David. But think of this: I have a conservative portfolio, blue-chip stocks and bonds. I can put enough aside just from the dividends to cover our expenses, even if you don’t make a penny more than you are now.”
“It’s no way for a child to grow up, Eleanor, seeing his father can’t provide. I’ve done that once. Never again.”
She touched his face, looking at him. “‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’ Have faith, David.”
“Nobly put, except for one thing, Eleanor: that’s the New Testament. I don’t ride that trolley, dear, remember?”
She sighed. “You know, it’s one thing to say you love me. That’s easy. It’s another to like me, to want to be with me. I’m not sure sometimes you understand the difference.”
“Of course I do.”
Her face lit up. And for a moment so did David’s; he thought he’d found Eleanor, all of her, at last, said the right words, done the right thing.
“Look,” she called, waving over his shoulder. “There’s Uncle Bertie! Hello! Wave, David! They’re waving to us!”
David waved, as ordered, but slowly, his fingers slightly flexed, as if massaging the heavy air. With the low late afternoon sun full in their eyes, at that distance no one ashore could gauge the emptiness of his face.
X
NOVEMBER 1930
“He’s awake,” the night nurse whispered. She adjusted the louvers with a practiced gentleness; a fretwork of light appeared on the quilt at the foot of the iron bed. Dr. Eberhardt stirred in his chair, his great body slimmed by the dawn murk. He blinked and whistled softly through his teeth and opened his eyes. Through the blinds the windows were treacly with rain. Hail, sleet, snow, and rain had cycled through the night; the downspouts trembled with the flow. Reverend Dulles, his hands at the edge of the counterpane, had little breath left in him. His skin was transparent, the flesh of his cheeks sinking into a death’s mask.
“He needs oxygen. Light another paper,” Dr. Eberhardt ordered the nurses, fitting the stethoscope into his ears. The ozone paper fizzed and flashed blue; a white trail uncoiled toward the parlor ceiling.
Dr. Eberhardt leant over his old friend and neighbor. He pressed his stethoscope to the Reverend’s chest for a long moment and listened, then nodded, somber, at the nurse. She opened the door to the hallway, where Foster and Eleanor kept vigil, seated on a pair of hard oak chairs from the manse dining room. Eleanor had talked her exhausted mother into bed an hour ago, then stayed with Foster at his post in the hall. They entered the parlor, silent, Foster first. Dr. Eberhardt muttered a quick “Good morning,” his chubby fingers tapping at the Reverend’s chest. He looked up, the truth clear in his red-rimmed eyes. “It’s pneumonia, Foster. He won’t last much longer. You should gather everyone.”
“Yes, you should,” said the Reverend in a cracked voice, surprising them all. “I have a few thoughts.”
A few thoughts: that was his phrase at family conclaves, his preface to the summing-up. He tried to cough but couldn’t. The nurse raised him onto the banked pillows.
“Oil of menthol, Miss Christopher,” the doctor said, slinging his stethoscope around his ample neck. “Open the passages, give him some relief.” The sheets atop Reverend Dulles’s chest rose and fell.
Foster inclined his head toward his sister. Eleanor left the parlor, her head pounding from the fatigue, and headed for the bedrooms upstairs to rouse her mother. She glanced out the window on the landing: the leaden dawn clouds crowded each other west before the nor’easter. She passed the room Allen often used during his visits home, empty, the sheets taut and undisturbed, the daguerreotype of Grandpa Watson astride a ceremonial horse in Peking hanging over the head of the bed. She d
idn’t allow herself to react to the empty room; that would come later. Through the hallway floor grate Eleanor could hear the peal of the kettle, smell the aroma of fresh rolls from below. The servants were already making breakfast: Irish tea, coffee from Kenya, hard-boiled brown farm eggs, Watertown’s own butter in disks in the cut glass cruets, the stem ginger marmalade Father adored.
Those breakfasts were over, Eleanor realized, forever. Not until her mother’s stricken face came to her bedroom door did Eleanor realize she herself was weeping. She took her mother’s hand. “It’s time, Mother,” Eleanor had rehearsed, “let’s be strong.”
But it was her mother, serene now, who carried her. “He has such faith, Ellie,” Mrs. Dulles said. “I wish I had his faith.”
The servants had been dismissed; already in mourning, they departed to console themselves over tea in the back kitchen. The sun had broken through the clouds by the time the Reverend spoke briefly of minor financial matters, but there was little left to address; Foster had long ago seen to that. Earthly matters concluded, Reverend Dulles gazed around the parlor. The immediate household had circled the bed, the day nurse near the door, Dr. Eberhardt at his old friend’s side, fists clasped behind his broad back; Mrs. Dulles and Eleanor on either side of the bed, each stroking one of the Reverend’s chalk white hands, Nataline and Margaret and Janet, Foster’s wife, in a semicircle at the foot of the bed. Foster placed himself beside Janet, stone-faced. Outside the parlor window, the manse’s great blue spruce undulated before the November wind; the dying man’s breathing mingled with the pattering against the window. He drew himself up on the pillows, a soft cough easing from him. Eleanor’s eye fell on the Presbyterian church calendar on her father’s big rolltop desk. Soon there will be icicles. Then a spark of annoyance brought her back. I must remember everything. There will be children someday to speak to of this.
The Witness Tree Page 9