The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  “The strength of our family has been vital to me all these years,” he whispered. “I want to know, in these last hours, that you will all continue to look to the family first. I want you all to know that I expect …” Here he stopped, his shallow breath whistling. “… that I expect you all to treat Foster as the head of the family now. I should … I should like you to swear, as your last promise to me, that you will all abide by Foster’s counsel.”

  An awkward silence followed this. No one, least of all Foster, had anticipated this last spark of drama in the old man. Mrs. Dulles stroked her husband’s cheek, her eyes never leaving his face. “I will, darling,” she said, her voice clear. Eleanor wept quietly as Margaret and Nataline and the others made their farewells and offered their oaths. Foster’s silent gaze never left his father’s face. As the grandchildren were led off by Miss Christopher, Eleanor looked at Foster: he seemed weighted already, a man stepping into a new life even as his father left this one.

  Eleanor’s tears had stolen her voice. Missing David desperately, she could only nod when her turn came, and hold her father’s hand as if to hold him on this planet.

  The undertakers moved like shadows in the stairwell, handing their long coats to the maid. Dr. Eberhardt must have called them, Eleanor thought. He was at the Reverend’s desk, filling in the death certificate in his old friend’s massive leather-backed chair. He had given Mrs. Dulles a sedative and was thoughtfully dipping his pen in her father’s favorite blue-black ink, the one he used for all his letters to Eleanor. She watched for a moment. Foster stepped beside her and closed the parlor door. He lit a cigar, the match flame trembling slightly as he held it to the leaves.

  “So. No Allen,” Eleanor said.

  “You can’t be surprised.” Foster patted his hair down, his habit when pushed to speak about the emotions of their family. It is all he can do to think of such things, Eleanor thought. “He knew Father, Ellie. He knew what it meant.”

  “I don’t understand. Knew what? Death?”

  “No, no. Knew he’d have to face Papa and choose whether or not to obey. That’s why he isn’t here. He’s worked for me for four years now—he didn’t have to ask for the time off from Sullivan. He knew all right.”

  Eleanor had never heard Foster talk in such terms. It’s the Scots in us, Eleanor thought. We can’t give words to what’s inside. She could see he was fighting something within.

  He drew on his cigar, expressionless. “Made him what he is, that,” Foster said, choosing each word as if it were in a foreign language. “Makes him soft and sharp, all at once, never really choosing. Talks pretty. People like listening to him. All the time he’s charming the daylights out of ’em, listening to them one better. Father ever tell you his theory?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “His idea was that Allen is none too fond of being in his own skin, so his charm’s a kind of a fog, keeps him protected from his real self. And that’s a dangerous vapor, Papa used to say, to store too close to raw ambition. Mighty combustible together.” Foster thought about that for a long minute before continuing. “No, Allen didn’t show up because it’s easier for him to keep skimming ’cross life. Choices are hard. He doesn’t much like hard.”

  Eleanor twisted the skin on her knuckle. “It would’ve humiliated him, that oath.”

  “Worse than that,” Foster said. He hadn’t shaved and that annoyed him further. “Would have made him choose. This way, he’s still in and out at the same time.” He made a tipping motion, back and forth, with the flat of his hand, like a man not quite sold by the deal on the table. “Open doors—that’s what Allen likes best. But that’s not where you make a man of yourself, Ellie, standing listening in the doorway. Not by a long chalk.”

  “Did Papa mind?”

  Foster glared through his spectacles with a cracker-barrel Yankee fierceness that alarmed Eleanor. “Of course he minded. No less than Mother does, no less than you do. And what’s most important, I minded. I know what his schedule is like at the firm, Ellie. I know when he can get away and when he can’t.” He turned away, his jaw set, the muscles in his cheeks taut. “Now let’s drop it. We owe it to Mother at least to keep the peace.”

  Eleanor nodded, then offered Foster both her hands, outstretched. He didn’t move, so she stepped toward him, awkward and slow, and pressed her arms through and past his, lowering her face to his solid chest. She could hear his heartbeat in the silence of the parlor hallway; his suit smelt of tobacco but also of somewhere safe, the memory of her father’s Sunday blacks.

  They stood there for a brief time, until Foster stepped backwards, stiff with embarrassment. “You’d better cable David, hadn’t you?” he asked. Foster fitted his glasses to his face then turned, already a man about his business.

  Eleanor watched him disappear upstairs, leaving only a thinning strand of smoke. The smoke made her think of David, a cigarette in his hand, reading late at night, his soft eyes moving over the pages of French, the gaze of a lover upon his beloved.

  ACT TWO

  Three may keep a secret if two are dead.

  Poor Richard’s Almanac, July 1736

  XI

  BERLIN

  SEPTEMBER 1932

  She saw him first: there might be nothing to tell otherwise. He was already at the lake’s edge, stowing his rucksack aboard his bright red kayak, alone in the gray-blue light of dawn, moving methodically, young, perhaps no more than eighteen, but much older in his carriage. He had an athlete’s body, disciplined, sure, unhurried. Eleanor wondered if he had paddled all night, for something—the way he double-checked his watch, perhaps, then scoured the north shore carefully—gave her to believe he had a timetable, that his was not a leisure tour in the picturesque half-light and early morning mist.

  He straightened, then opened a map, the same chart of the rivers and lakes she had herself. For a paperweight he used a thick red book, and Eleanor had seen that before too, in the hands of her colleagues in London a decade ago. That’s Marx, she thought, and the thought gave her a strange thrill. Red boat, red book, red baron.

  She had been awake in her tent for some minutes, listening to the birds gathering in the trees across the Krumme Lanke and the lap of the water. Last night, by the light of her primus, after setting aside her work on Basel’s freshly hatched Bank for International Settlements, she’d read a handful of election pamphlets that extolled this fellow Hitler. She was intrigued enough to write Foster a letter musing about the Austrian Great War corporal’s political rise. It’s a kind of awful hero worship, which leaves me cold, she wrote, but I do think there’s some merit in his economic thinking. I think, she repeated, cautiously, for she’d heard the stories of the “political murders,” the bodies found floating off the shores of lakes like this one.

  The familiar scrape of the canvas faltboot on the coarse beach had stirred her. Still in her sleeping bag, Eleanor had found her thick spectacles and opened her tent, not ten yards away from the source of the sound. No one had stolen so much as a pfennig from her in hundreds of miles of kayaking that summer, but who could be sure? Her tent was pitched on a deserted stretch of the Grunewald lakeshore of southwest Berlin. Her native caution kept her inside her tent for a moment, despite the easy comradeship of the German waters.

  Faltbooting was all the rage that autumn of 1932. Germany’s rivers were dotted with the collapsible canvas-skinned boats, and Eleanor, ever the water enthusiast, was literally the first American woman to join the craze. The country’s riverside hotels and pensions were crowded with faltbooters, as were the intercity trains, their baggage cars ferrying the neatly folded craft southward. Then the September rains came. She had been alone on the river for two full days’ solitary paddling, shrouded in oilskins, her glasses blebbed with rain. Heaven.

  She looked at the newcomer again. Perhaps, she thought, the rains had made him late, but he did not look like a man late for anything. Then he did a most remarkable thing. He reached into the skirt of his kayak and produced
a silver shape, winking in the morning light. She couldn’t quite make out what it was until he began to play, at first a fast scale of eighth notes, ascending, then a sharp jazzy trill off the top and the first slow notes of something she recognized, a song she’d danced to, that famous song about memory and love’s refrain. She listened, still as stone, as the ballad sighed out over the water, invisible smoke.

  He stopped and lowered the silver cornet and stared across the lake. His gaze disappeared into the mist, his shoulders hunched, as he listened for something she could not hear. She threw aside her sleeping bag and drew on her rolled-up dungarees, her feet bare. She ran her fingers through her wiry hair. She could feel her pulse in the palms of her hands and looked down at them for a moment.

  Eleanor needed a prop. She pulled her facecloth from her rucksack and her soap in its Bakelite clamshell. She strode across the gritty sand, feeling each grain. He was squatting at the water’s edge, the way children do at the beach, bare-legged now in his shorts, and bare-chested, his shirt and wool sweater tossed aside, the cornet on top of the heap.

  He turned. “Morgen,” he said, his eyes scanning her. They were large and brown, set under dark eyebrows; his forelock fell over his forehead, dangling in midair. He had been rinsing his neck and face, which ran with water.

  “Morgen,” she replied in her schoolgirl German. She had no idea what to say next.

  He had paused, thinking very fast, she thought. He struck a needle of water off his chin and wiped his hand in the sand, rubbing it dry. He shook the grains from his palm and then stood, barely a yard from her, his hand out, the gesture of a fellow sportsman.

  She reached for his hand and he grasped her forearm, startling her. “Misha Resnikoff, at your service,” he said in an English precise but tinged with Slavic rolling r’s.

  She had not expected English. “How did you—”

  He was kissing her hand now and caught her again in his glance. “I know a few accents. I speak German, Russian, English, French, naturally.” As if everyone does, Eleanor thought, trying to ignore the electricity traveling up her arm. We tongue-tied Americans. “A little Polish, less Italian, a few words of Armenian, my grandfather’s language. But I confess,” he said, straightening and releasing her arm, “it was your spectacles. They are most American.”

  “Well, a very good guess indeed,” she said. “Eleanor Dulles.” She opened her mouth but nothing more came: her mind had gone blank. She looked behind him, beyond, for something to say.

  “You bought your boat where? I see it’s a new model,” he said, filling the moment gallantly.

  She had jammed her hands behind her, clutching towel and soap; she could not seem to find a comfortable way to stand. “Bad Tölz, actually. I see yours is a two-seater,” she observed, but she found herself again taking in his face. For an instant—only an instant—she thought of her David, stolid, obsessed, distant, reliable, waving her goodbye at the Hamburg America Line pier in New York. They’d worked out another truce, this time to cover her departure. Marriage? She’d sworn to herself she’d keep that topic out of mind.

  As if he’d sensed this, something in his eyes shifted then. “Yes,” he said coolly, “I sometimes carry much luggage for the long trips and I find I need the space.” Then nothing, considering her. He had a heavy beard, a fact that seemed terribly important. She looked down instinctively at his hands, tanned and dark, the palms pale and ridged with a paddler’s calluses.

  “Ah,” was all she could find to say. Then, trying to redeem herself: “It’s a beautiful morning. I was listening to the birds at dawn. Then you began to play.”

  “Yes, I do play a little. Perhaps you are a poet?” he offered, tugging his shirt on, the muscles between ribs and shorts moving like fish beneath his skin.

  She laughed, delighted. “No, no, no,” she said, recovering. “An economist.”

  “I am going to Cambridge this term,” he said matter-of-factly. “My family business is banking. That is,” he said firmly, “not my life. No. This month I am reading Marx. Das Kapital. So my life is travel and an education in the world, jazz more than anything.” He seemed uncannily self-aware for one so young, she thought.

  “What will you study?”

  “Mathematics,” he said, and showed all his teeth in a self-mocking smile. “I believe it is my calling. But now, Miss Eleanor Dulles,” he said, freezing off the smile, “I must go. I have an appointment. My apologies—it would have been most pleasant to speak about economics here in this beautiful place with you. Unfortunately not.”

  “Unfortunately not,” she repeated.

  He extended his hand again and repeated the faltbooter’s gesture. Again her spine turned to light.

  Then he was in his faltboot, an old one, she noticed, its sides patched, a small ensign on the kayak’s red prow lifting as the breeze gathered. She plucked at her hair, thinking. “Where are you from, may I ask?”

  He looked at the ensign then back at her, settling into the kayak’s aft seat. “Latvia. Riga.” Then he stopped himself and grinned again. “Be well, Eleanor Dulles. Auf Wiedersehen.”

  “Yes. Auf Wiedersehen.”

  He worked his double-ended paddle methodically, the stroke of one used to the economy required of great distances. She admired his style as the kayak edged into the mist; he amused her with a pair of hard splashes, a kayaker’s salute. Then he was gone. She peered into the drifting mist and for a moment, as the mist fissured like cheddar, she could see the tiny bridge she had used for a landfall the night before, spanning the lake at its narrowest. There, on the bridge, in the shadow of a taller figure, stock-still, stood a child in profile, a knapsack on his back, a bulky fellow in a Greek fisherman’s cap holding his hand.

  The mists crept back, filaments of fog knitting above the smooth water.

  XII

  NEW YORK

  DECEMBER 1932

  Friday night, a quarter past eight: one by one, the shining dark limousines drew up to the front door of 48 Wall Street, their headlamps throwing jaundiced cones through the veil of snow. A dozen beggars worked both sides of the street, guessing this would be the richest pickings north of the Bowery. But the partygoers moved straight from their cars to the open doorway of Sullivan and Cromwell, where a doorman in full livery moved the vagrants on. He wasn’t inhuman about it: management had provided him with a small float to pay the bums off and prevent them distressing the entering partners and their families.

  A modest green Ford pulled up to the curb, property of the archdiocese of New York. A monsignor stepped out, in his all-black formal habit and the simple peaked black skullcap of his rank. He was deep in thought and, a casual glance might tell, not much pleased with his thoughts. His narrow face was pinched with irritation at the snow that melted on his thick round spectacles.

  The doorman, who noticed such things as a matter of course, took in two things about the monsignor: first, he smoked a dark cigarette in the backhanded European fashion; second, he carried the same style of square black leather briefcase the Sullivan and Cromwell men carried their paperwork in. He batted away the snowflakes like flies, a particular sort of foreigner’s gesture, ignoring the doorman completely. A German for sure, the doorman thought, that exasperation is pure Kraut, as he closed the impressive door behind the cleric.

  “Takes all kinds,” he muttered as the next car pulled up.

  On the fifth floor, where Negro maids in starched caps glided with silver trays full of cut crystal tumblers of Prohibition eggnog through the softly lit boardrooms, the monsignor, Franz-Josef Sommer, late of Vienna and Salzburg and the Quirinal, made straight for the office at the end of the hall. He bypassed the crowd of partners smoking cigars and making grave small talk in the uncomfortable way businessmen do; this was Protestant turf, the terrain of the shrewdest trust lawyers in the United States in service to the most powerful men in the land. The monsignor had an after-hours appointment and he was early, as was his custom. He took a seat and waited in the oak chair at th
e end of the hall, his briefcase across his knees, a society dowager’s lapdog.

  He lit another dark oval cigarette and reproved himself silently for not bringing a newspaper. He had so little time to himself on these trips, it would have been good to have something to read now. He sighed and drew on his cigarette as the door opened. A young woman with a fashionably curly permanent wave and a well-turned leg slipped out, her corkscrew hair slightly askew. She did not see the monsignor and stepped away from the open hallway, to an alcove to his left. There, she gathered herself in the shadows. The monsignor averted his eyes and wished again for his newspaper. The young woman walked past him, carrying a stack of gramophone records. She headed purposefully down the side hall, but the hawkeyed monsignor wasn’t fooled for an instant.

  “Ah, Monsignor Sommer,” a hearty voice beckoned when the office door opened again a moment later. “Foster’s tied up with another matter for a few minutes, but do come on in.” Allen Dulles raised a hand in benediction. “And Merry Christmas, too. Can I get you a drink?”

  “A little wine, red, if you please,” Monsignor Sommer replied as he lowered himself into one of Foster’s grand leather chairs; it gave a faint hiss as he settled. Allen pressed a button on the intercom and ordered a decanter of red from the firm’s private store.

  “Glad you could make the party,” Allen said, taking Foster’s high-backed chair as if it were his own. “How was the trip over?”

  “I had not traveled on a zeppelin before, Mr. Dulles—”

  The monsignor’s lawyer raised a diffident hand. “Please, Monsignor. Allen.”

  “I found it very pleasant, with typical German service. The sea,” he said, extracting another dark cigarette from his case—at which Allen pressed a big brass gas lighter into service—“the sea unfortunately does not agree with me.” He paused and exhaled. “Very kind of your firm to make the arrangements.”