“That’s why I’m here,” Foster said, lowering himself into the hard wooden hospital chair.
“I’ll tell you a story, then. The night before the wedding, I had no problem getting to sleep,” Eleanor began. “But two-thirty came—I noticed the clock—and I woke up completely. My mind was so clear, as if I’d slept half the day away. I went out on the balcony and looked out at the Potomac. David was at his sister’s place in Baltimore, so I searched the horizon, imagining where he was, where he was sleeping, what he was dreaming, what our life would be like together.” She stared absently out the window now. “I had no premonitions, even with all the problems we’d had. I’d made up my mind that he was the man for me for the rest of my days, that we were what we were, that we’d grow together, be together, have children together. I wasn’t distracted, wasn’t worried. I knew David had great pain. I couldn’t have not known. I suppose the psychiatrists would know what went wrong, but I—no, wrong is the wrong word. He was a dark soul. There were parts of him that were unreachable—even, I think, for him.” She turned back to Foster. “Can you imagine such a thing? You know, when we went to France together, that first time, he was so transformed. Happy, down to his shoes. I think he’d finally managed to escape all the guilt about his divorce and not seeing his son. That was … soul-destroying. That was the phrase he used, and it must have been. For him.”
“You haven’t told me why you chose the name.”
“Oh, Foster, you’re hopeless. This isn’t about the name. It’s not nearly as important as you make it, not nearly as important as how much I loved him. Still do: that’s the point. When I came out of the anesthesia yesterday morning, I was pretty wobbly. When I finally got my glasses on and I could see Sophie, I heard David’s voice. Not in my imagination, but right here. He was right here, in this room. He wasn’t a shadow, but a feeling at the back of my neck that another person was in the room, with us. Do you believe me, Foster?”
He raised both hands, leaving the homburg nestled in his lap. “I’ve never known you to lie about anything, Ellie. If you say it’s so, it’s so.”
“We’re no good at this talking about ourselves, Foster,” Eleanor muttered, “not in this family. We’re just something awful at it.” Her eyes filled again, swimming behind her spectacles. “The worst thing, the very worst thing, is that everyone talks about David as though he’s gone. It’s awful. I need to talk about him, to say his name, remember his smell, the way he held a book, the softness of his eyes, the boy inside all that formality.” She searched her brother’s face. “You have to be patient with me, Foster. You mustn’t judge. I need you to talk about David, just so I can hear his name. And don’t leave the room, don’t abandon me. I know how hard it is to see me … like this. But please stay. The biggest terror is that I’ll let all the grief out, all at once, when I’m alone … then I’ll disappear. I’ll just disappear.”
Foster took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes, looking suddenly old. He fitted his glasses back on and said, “Is there anything I can do, of a practical nature?”
Eleanor surprised even herself—she laughed. “You know how you can help most—oh dear, that’s all wrong, you’ve been a tower since David died—but just one small thing, that you’ll be so good at. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“Let the others know. About talking about David. I can’t tell them all, one by one.”
“All right.”
“Starting with Allen.”
“Starting with Allen?”
“Whenever we meet, as soon as he can, he leaves the room, his face even glummer than mine. It’s infuriating. Like he’s the one in mourning.”
Foster leant forward in the old chair. “I will. I’ll do it. Now about baby’s name, Ellie. You were saying.”
“I forget … I’m sorry.”
“David’s voice,” Foster reminded her. “You were remembering David’s voice.”
“Oh, God, Foster, I’m forgetting everything.” She blinked, running her fingers through her hair. The morning sun cut sharp squares of light on the white ward room wall. “That afternoon, before the wedding—we had no money, you see, I wanted to give him something special. I’d told him I was going to keep Dulles, but I chose his name then and there. As a gift. That’s all. A gift.” Her gaze locked on the newborn, sleeping in her arms.
Foster watched her, waiting.
“Do you think he’d mind?” she said at last. “David did love me so.”
From the personal archive of Misha Resnikoff
Discovered in file labeled only as “May 1936” / translated from French by MR
Prof Dr Guillaume Charteris-Reynaud [personal file: 498/23R] of the Sorbonne was visiting Prof Dr Barenberg [personal file: 124/61E] in New York in February 1934, approximately two weeks before the suicide. 23R was not interviewed by the New York police in connection with the suicide of 61E, as he had returned to Paris before the time of his colleague’s death. This was his first statement about the matter. Operative T—, a stringer for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, interviewed 23R at his residence 63–65 rue du Bac, VII, May 16 1934.
Operative T- located 23R by looking for past coauthors of 61E. Her shorthand notes follow; acting on instructions from headquarters, Operative T- did not publish her findings.
May 16 1934
Prof Dr Charteris-Reynaud is a widower, aged 52, severely wounded in action at Bois des Caures, near Verdun, losing most of his lower right leg. He was invalided out of the armed forces in March 1917 and walks with a profound limp. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroism in the Bois de [illegible] action. He knew Prof Dr Barenberg well; the two were fellow specialists in romantic medieval poetry of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries.
Charteris-Reynaud was on a New York subway car on February 4 1934, a Sunday, en route to a scheduled meeting with Barenberg at the Grand Central Station, at 2pm. Charteris-Reynaud had asked to see a painting exhibition at a gallery on 42nd Street run by his cousin [illegible].
As Charteris-Reynaud left the car, he saw Barenberg and a much larger man, well dressed, big square body, in rimless glasses, homburg hat. “He looked German, especially as he wore acetate collars, very dated. We haven’t seen those in Paris since before the war,” was Charteris-Reynaud’s reaction. “Barenberg had confronted the other man. That was clear. They were having a terrific argument at the far end of the platform, past the stairs up, away from the others there. I didn’t know how to approach them and my English is not very good, but I could see the bigger man was irate [illegible].
“‘I have Jewish clients all over Germany,’ he kept shouting. Barenberg appeared terrified, that was my first impression. The bigger man was quite close to him. I thought he might hit Barenberg with his fist or his umbrella.
“I waited near the stairs. There was a small crowd there, from the earlier train, watching. Barenberg didn’t move. He stood there and took it, a real tongue-lashing.
“Nobody moved until the conductor blew his whistle and then the man shouting at Barenberg left the platform. Barenberg was quite shaken. I asked who the man was and he said ‘my brother-in-law.’ He wouldn’t say what the argument was about, but he did admit ‘it is a family matter.’
“I have known Barenberg for over twenty years: I have never seen him in such a state. I had misread his posture. He was pale and sweating, but he wasn’t afraid: he was furious.
“It is my opinion that Barenberg’s brother-in-law had been very insulted by something Barenberg had said, something about the Jews in Germany. I have never seen him so profoundly disturbed.”
XVII
NEAR DOVER PLAINS NY
AUGUST 1935
The shaded forest track was relief indeed from the heat wave they’d driven through on the new state parkway up from Salt Point. The unpaved wooded road wound along the hillslope some thirty feet above the creek bed, falling away almost vertically to their left, a palisade of hardy balsam and crisscrossing vines overhanging the rushing white water bel
ow.
Grace slowly edged her mother’s pretentious big black car—a peace offering in the ongoing Dunlop wars—over the old wooden bridge and into a small spur of earthen roadway nestled beneath the canopy of hillside trees. She switched off the ignition. For a long second all anyone could hear was the hissing roar of the creek slashing its way over the rocks and the tinkling of the engine as it cooled.
Clover Dulles opened her door gently. “So quiet,” she said. “Allen would love it here.”
Eleanor had the sleeping Sophie at her feet. With a practiced lift, she gently raised the toddler up and deposited her across her shoulder without waking her. “It’s perfect,” Eleanor agreed. “I found this place when I first walked the trail, Clo. One of the farmers told me about the old limekilns across the bridge. They’re pre-Revolutionary.”
Grace had her hands on her hips, shaking her head at the wall of water crashing down the belly of the gorge. “Well, my dear, you’ve found us a spot and a half here. I should have brought India. She’s mad for water—look at it, delicious!”
“I haven’t brought my bathing suit,” Clover observed.
“That makes two of us!” Grace replied, laughing slyly.
Eleanor shrugged at Clover as her sister-in-law shared with Grace the weight of Aunt Eleanor’s massive wicker picnic basket.
“What the devil’s in here, Ellie, a body?” Grace demanded.
“Not too fast,” Clover warned. “I haven’t your strength, Grace.”
“Been in the family forever,” Eleanor replied. “When we were children, Allen called it ‘the coffin’—Father always made him carry it.”
They picnicked on an enormous sun-warmed boulder just above the flying water, three pale fish on a rock, full in the mid-afternoon glare. Afterwards, Grace and Eleanor lolled naked in the rapids, Clover read the Sunday paper, and Sophie slept in the pine crèche Eleanor had stowed in the limousine’s trunk, in the shade of a towering Austrian pine.
“Warmest I’ve ever felt this,” Eleanor judged, rising and falling with the pulse of the creek water. “Usually it’s like ice, coming right out of the Berkshires. I haven’t been here since … years. I remember the first time I came here, just before I went up to Bryn Mawr. I camped up on the hill, cooked in the rain, and loved every minute of it.”
“One woman against nature,” Grace offered. “That’s you.” She considered Eleanor, the creek water sluicing over her freckled shoulders. They had settled just downstream of the bridge, its silhouette cutting the afternoon sun in half. “Our husbands do have this habit of shuffling off, don’t they?”
“I can’t be flippant about it yet. There are times I look at Sophie and …” Eleanor’s voice fell to nothing.
Grace stroked her friend’s cheek and the line of her jaw with a finger slick with water. “I know, darling, I know. I sometimes catch Peter’s grin when India’s prattling on about something else entirely. Oh, dear God, who’d have thought we’d both end up widows?”
“Do you ever think you might have saved Peter—”
Grace hooted, harsh in that place, and splashed at Eleanor. “That way madness lies, darling. We’re each of us born alone and we die alone—I’ve no illusions on that score. Peter died because he looked the wrong way on a bad horse. It threw him. And the fall killed him, as night follows day. Not a thing I could have done about it, even ten feet away.”
Grace said nothing more as they watched a blue heron trout-spotting not twenty yards upstream of them.
“No one’s suggesting you forget for a moment, darling, not a single moment. My granny Trinette Agnes, a real dame, had a saying she saved for funerals—and Granny Tee went to plenty of those. ‘You can forgive them for dying—that’s easy enough, in due time. But then you have to forgive yourself your own regrets—and that’s like pulling teeth.’”
Grace let herself float past Eleanor, down the staircase of falling water, her feet bobbing out of the bubbling turbulence. She reversed, nestling against a big trapezoid of granite, and took Eleanor in. They had eddied out of the shadow of the wooden plank bridge, much closer to Clover and Sophie, who slept on, a smudge of pink and white against the great black rock.
“Haven’t lost that Presbyterian faith, have you, darling?” Grace asked Eleanor. “Going pagan like your sister-in-spirit?”
“I gave real thought to converting, you know,” Eleanor admitted.
“Oh, that’s priceless, that is,” Grace disparaged. “D’you know, they shave their heads and wear wigs, Jewish women? Did you really think to convert, darling? Or was it a spot of lovesickness?”
“That,” Clover observed mildly over the top of her newspaper, “would’ve set the cat amongst the pigeons in the Dulles clan, wouldn’t it?”
“That’d appeal to you, Clover Dulles,” Grace said between laughs. “You and your reputation for mischief.”
“I’d have had his faith, at least,” Eleanor replied from the creek below. “There’s that.”
“Easy for me to say, Eleanor, but you’re not alone in this world,” Clover gently chided. “You do have your child. I know, if I ever lost Allen, I’d find comfort in our children. I think being alone would be just an awful thing after a loss like that. But those Dulles boys would fare just fine.” She paused and turned a page. “You know, I do believe they’re a pair of sharks, those brothers of yours.”
The others stared at the slim figure behind the newspaper for a long moment.
“Well, I’ll be … out of the mouths of babes,” Grace said, standing up, hands on hips. She drove a glassy crest of creek water at Eleanor with both palms. “Enough doom and gloom!” she bellowed. “You brought us here—enjoy it, Miss Muddlehead! Race you to that rock!” Grace arced her lithe body out of the water for an instant, diving into the swirling pool downstream. Eleanor gave chase, her laughter echoing into the trees, healed, for the span of that sweltering afternoon, by Grace’s sheer waterborne momentum.
XVIII
WASHINGTON, D.C.
APRIL 1936
The spring rains in Washington that year were warm and relentless, a perpetual drizzle knocking loose the fragile new magnolia and cherry blossoms, sending them spinning down the gutters, lost ships. By mid-month, as the taxman beckoned, Washington had assumed the half-drowned air of a tropical outpost. In the teeming lobby of the byzantine Senate Office Building, a morning full of numbers in her head, the newest hire of the burgeoning Social Security Board’s pensions office unfurled her umbrella. Eleanor had spent the past two hours on the politicians’ turf and she’d escaped with her skin intact, no mean accomplishment for a rookie.
A familiar voice: five yards from her, his raincoat blotched with rain, Foster had entered the lobby, close in conversation with a colleague, both forceful, big men. Foster’s interlocutor stood half a foot taller, square-jawed and crew-cut, a dime-sized swastika button in his lapel.
Spotting his sister, Foster called: “Ellie, hello! I left you a message this morning. You get it?”
“No, Foster. I’ve been in Social Security meetings all morning.”
“Eleanor, this is Bar—” A sheaf of papers slipped from Foster’s grasp, spinning down. “Pardon me …”
The German stepped into the breach, taking her hand, kissing it, and clicking his heels. “Baron Kurt von Schröder. Enchanté. I have read your book on the Bank for International Settlements, madame. Most informative.”
“Good of you to say so, Baron,” Eleanor replied. “I went to Germany to write it, actually. And, what with Sullivan and Cromwell’s interest in the bank, I did have my brothers to interview first, you see.”
Foster had recovered his papers. “The Baron is on the BIS board, Eleanor. He holds the German seat. His family owns the Stein Bank of Köln.”
They chatted. None of them saw the older couple at first. They advanced arm in arm, put-upon and not a little lost in the jumble of the buzzing mid-morning crowd beneath the rotunda, in their sixties, fading, the two of them, him with a salt-and-pepper beard
, her in a worn persian lamb jacket and veiled hat.
Eleanor, glancing at them over Foster’s shoulder, saw the woman just as she seemed to recognize Schröder. Her heels clattering, her face anguished, she shrieked: “Dieb! Nazi! Verbrecher!” and flew past Eleanor with surprising speed, striking Schröder on the ear with her clutch purse, blindsiding him, knocking his hat off. The Baron parried the next blow with his briefcase as onlookers stared.
The older man with her caught Schröder’s attacker in mid-stride, shouting, “Herauf, bitte, Beate! Herauf! Bitte!”
The woman, sobbing with rage, hauled back her veil and spat at Schröder, barely missing. A red-faced Capitol policeman, his belly jouncing as he ran, stepped into the circle around Schröder. “Hey, break it up, break it up! This is the Senate of the United States, lady.”
His voice shaking, the bearded man this time held his wife back. “My wife is … upset. Beate, bitte, Ruhe!”
“That doesn’t mean she can hit people,” the policeman warned. “Now you two stand over there. Move it.” The couple stepped aside. He took in Schröder. “You all right, sir?”
The Baron’s voice was low and hard. “Fine, thank you. Tell me, officer, do you allow madwomen in your government buildings as a matter of course?”
“She just came up and started swinging, officer,” Foster said.
“Nobody hurt?” the policeman demanded.
“No,” Foster stated. “I’m an attorney, officer. I think my client would prefer to let this slide. He’s a visiting dignitary.”
Looking the couple over—the old gent was dabbing his wife’s eyes with a handkerchief—the policeman jerked a thick thumb at them. “They leave. Now. No charges. Okay?”
“Thank you, officer,” Foster said. The policeman approached the older couple and escorted them out the grand front doors.
Eleanor had picked up Schröder’s black hat and handed it to him. “I can assure you, Baron, Washington isn’t usually this exciting.”
The Witness Tree Page 14