by Susan Rieger
“Harry’s going to be cross when he finds out you’ve deconstructed the photo,” Eleanor said.
“Not to worry,” Will said. “After a while, he’ll begin thinking he was the one who figured it out.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with him,” Eleanor said. “Is it turning forty?”
“It’s Dad dying,” Will said, “and the Wolinskis. It’s thrown all of us. And we didn’t expect it to.” Eleanor was silent.
“I understand why Harry got so mad at you,” Will said. “He should have behaved better, but the feeling, I understand.”
“Why?”
“Who else do you get mad at when things go wrong?” Will paused. “You seemed so untroubled by the Wolinskis.” He paused again. “Why did you clean out the apartment?”
“Are you mad at me too?” Eleanor said.
Will didn’t answer.
After a long silence, Eleanor spoke. “There was too much of the five of you. Every time I asked any of you if I could, once and for all, clean out Limbo, you howled. You were never going to be ready.” Eleanor picked up Rupert’s baby bonnet. “Finally, I just threw it all out. The only things I kept were your stuffed animals. They’re still here, sitting on the top shelf, bereft: Nins, George, Bup, Lump, Bama.” Eleanor gestured toward Limbo. “You’re the only one who gave your animal a proper name. From the beginning, you spoke in sentences. You had no baby words. Wouldn’t you like to take George, for your baby?” Eleanor paused for several seconds, weighing her words. At what point, she wondered, would her sons stop thinking their parents existed only for them? “There was too much of Dad in the apartment. I couldn’t get on with life. Can you understand?”
“We were sore,” Will said. “It seemed so soon.”
“I didn’t sell it,” Eleanor said. “I thought of it. It’s so big. There are rooms I never go into. I don’t need seven bedrooms.”
“We talked about that,” Will said. “Harry was going to buy it. Over Lea’s dead body.”
“I knew Dad was dying from the first diagnosis. You all thought he’d get better. It’s no surprise you were thrown.” Eleanor cleared her throat. “Götterdämmerung on West Sixty-Seventh.”
—
Rupert, once he’d settled in America, showed no interest in returning to England. It took almost twenty years for him to make his first trip back, and he went in 1975 only because Eleanor insisted. “It’s time to visit England,” she said. “You need to go back.” Rupert continued to resist. “Only if you come with me,” he said. Eleanor agreed. Tom was just five, old enough, she thought, to be left for a week without sinking into despair. He was her most dramatic child, the most emotional of them, the most responsive to suffering, his own and others’. All through high school and college, when he wasn’t playing tennis, he devoted his free time to the homeless and tempest tossed: mothers with three jobs, children with fetal alcohol syndrome, cons, ex-cons, gang members, prostitutes, drug addicts, SRO tenants. His Princeton was Trenton, where he tutored, worked in soup kitchens, registered voters, urban homesteaded, and campaigned to elect the city’s first black mayor. His heroes were the Berrigans. He cursed his ill luck for having grown up post-Selma, post-Vietnam, post-Nixon, post-Attica, with no reason to sit in at lunch counters, burn the American flag, chain himself to a prison fence, steal FBI files, go underground. “All we can do now is sue the bastards,” he told his parents. “I don’t have a sense of justice, only injustice.”
Tom wept his way through his first week away from his mother. His brothers rallied. Sam let him sleep in his room. Will took him to school on the public bus, like a big boy. Harry read to him at bedtime. Even Jack stepped up. When Tom cried at dinner or bedtime, he’d cry too. As she tucked Jack into bed her first night back, Eleanor asked, “Were you sad when we were away?”
“It’s OK, Mom,” Jack said. “I wasn’t very sad, not like Tom. I’m bigger. I didn’t want Tom to cry alone. He always cried first.” Jack’s face got serious. “I’ll tell you a secret. When I cried with him, he stopped crying sooner.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have another secret. Harry gave me a quarter every time I cried. I did it ten times. That’s two dollars and fifty cents. It’s in a jar over there.” He turned to point to his bookshelf, then looked back at Eleanor. “Could I sleep in your bed tonight?” he said.
Eleanor found Tom in Sam’s room, begging his older brother to let him sleep there. Sam refused. “Now that Mom’s home, you have to sleep in your own room.” Tom started to whimper. “If you cry, I’ll call you a cry-baby,” Sam said. “Sam,” Eleanor said, startled by his ruthlessness. Sam threw her a look of aggravation. “We’ve all looked after him and we’re tired of it. Please put him away.” Tom turned his face to the wall.
“Time to go to bed, Tomahawk,” Eleanor said. She picked him up and threw him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He clung to her back, laughing and shouting. In his room, she dropped him with a thump on his bed.
“Are you going to go away again?” he asked.
“Not for a while,” Eleanor said.
“Jack cried every night,” Tom said. “Harry read me Charlotte’s Web.”
Eleanor reckoned the trip a partial success; Rupert said he’d go again. Before leaving for America, Rupert had spent no more than ten days in London. He felt almost as much an alien there as Eleanor. During their visit, they stayed at Claridge’s, went to museums and the theatre, ate dark gray roast beef and pale gray Brussels sprouts, attended evensong at St. Paul’s, and explored the neighborhoods rich American tourists preferred. As always, with Eleanor, Rupert behaved well but she saw he was out of sorts, listless and tired, as if he were coming down with the flu.
“What’s wrong?” Eleanor asked the fourth day.
“It hasn’t changed enough. Or I haven’t,” he said.
“Let’s leave. Let’s go to the Cotswolds or Salisbury or Bath,” she said. She knew not to suggest Chichester or Longleat or Cambridge.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
When Tom was seven, they took the boys to London for the first time. They went to the Tower, Hyde Park Corner, Madame Tussauds, the Mews at Buckingham Palace, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. They had high tea at the Dorchester, fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s, and bangers and mash at Wimpy’s. They saw The Mousetrap in its twenty-fourth year. The boys thought Cornish pasties the worst things they ever ate, after English ice cream, which didn’t melt. They saw England play Australia at Lords and Chelsea play Aston Villa at Stamford Bridge. Rupert bought them each a cricket bat and ball and they played in Hyde Park, drawing a small audience attracted by their loud voices and colonial accents.
The boys declared it a great vacation, and Rupert seemed reconciled to England, almost taking pride in his homeland as he explained the rules of cricket and the War of the Roses. Tom acquired an English accent that passed on the plane for the real thing. “An English cousin,” Eleanor said to the stewardess. Sam added to his list of Anglicisms. “What’s a bugger?” he asked his father. “There are two equivalents,” Rupert said. “As a throwaway insult, ‘asshole’ pretty much covers it. More literally, a bugger is a butt fucker.” Sam stared at his dad. He had never heard him use bad language. This must be English Dad speaking, he thought. “I wouldn’t use it around adults, if I were you,” Rupert said. Jack had brought his trumpet, smuggled like contraband in his backpack, a violation of Eleanor’s packing rules. “There will be no place to play it,” Eleanor had said to him before they left. He carried it with him at all times. During their scratch cricket match, he played “God Save the Queen.” The audience applauded. Harry called him a suck-up. “It’s ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ I was playing,” Jack said, kicking at Harry’s shin. “I was fooling them.” Will asked his dad why no one in America played soccer. “Your children will play soccer,” Rupert said. “Americans think a World Series is Detroit against Cincinnati.”
—
Rupert visited Will at Cambridge in 1989, during Will’s s
econd year there. He went alone. Eleanor insisted. “It means something special to both of you. Off you go.” It was his tenth return trip but the first time he had left London’s environs. He rented a car, a Peugeot. He liked driving in England. The transition to left-hand drive was easy and he liked shifting. It gave him a false but comforting sense of belonging. He turned the radio on. Melvyn Bragg was interviewing Penelope Fitzgerald. He fiddled with the knob, searching for music. He could feel the blood rushing in his ears as he drove east.
Will was at King’s, where Rupert had been. They spent their first day walking around the college, pointing things out to each other. Will introduced his father to his tutor, Dominic Byrne, a shambling, humorous, heavy-drinking ex-Jesuit with a Derry accent and an Irish appetite for irony.
“A lot has changed since you’ve been here,” Byrne said. “And a lot hasn’t. Your boy, a chip off the old block.”
“He’s a chip off his mother’s block,” Rupert said. “I was a scholarship boy.”
“Will said you went to Longleat,” Byrne said.
“Scholarship boy,” Rupert said.
“Before that?” Byrne said.
“The Prebendal School. Chorister. Scholarship boy.”
“Before that?”
“St. Pancras Primary School, Chichester. It was attached to the orphanage I grew up in,” Rupert said.
Byrne rocked back on his heels.
“Yes, I know,” Rupert said, “I could almost pass for a gentleman.”
“Would you be my guest at high table tomorrow?” Byrne said. “I know Will will want to have dinner with you tonight, but by tomorrow the two of you could no doubt use a break.”
“Are you setting me up? Will the provost ask me for money?” Rupert asked.
“We’ve got a scholarship fund,” Byrne said. “Just up your alley.” He paused. “Though we’re short of orphans these days.”
Rupert endowed a scholarship at King’s in the name of the Reverend Henry Falkes, orphans preferred but not required. He and Byrne became good friends, close friends, as close as both were able. Byrne visited Rupert six months before he died, a last visit when Rupert was still himself. He came back to speak at Rupert’s funeral. Eleanor wanted to pay his fare. He refused. “My pocket can sustain the loss, dear heart,” he said. “It’s my heart that can’t.”
“I was right to wait to go back to Cambridge,” Rupert said to Eleanor when he was back in New York. “It’s almost a different place. I could breathe there for the first time.” He looked away from Eleanor as he often did when emotion caught up with him. “It was effortless for Will. He felt as comfortable there as at Princeton.” He turned toward her. “He has a beautiful English girlfriend, Frances, Francie,” he said. “Blond.”
—
Rupert’s visit to Longleat that year was unsettling, more like what he’d been expecting from Cambridge. He had been at Longleat just after World War II, when no one had money or servants or heating or meat or electricity. What had survived the war were the titles and bloodlines, the great houses and families. Rupert had felt his disinheritance and dispossession; there were other orphans, war orphans, but they knew their fathers’ names. By the end of his first week, he knew where he stood in the social rankings. As a scholar and the ward of an Anglican minister, his status was just respectable. An earl’s son, thick as a post, might stumble his way through Longleat on his way to Teddy Hall without a hint of self-doubt troubling his sleep. Rupert saw that he would have to succeed. Longleat was an indelible lesson on money and class. England in 1946 was not far removed from Trollope. A gentleman might inherit money, spend money, borrow money, marry money; he would not work for money. He would take up a profession, one of a limited number—the bar, the church, government and politics, the Army or Navy, public school or university teaching. Salary never determined his choice. City men worked for money; so did Americans, unabashedly, unapologetically. Rupert determined to go where the money was to be made.
Rupert stopped in at the Headmaster’s Office to introduce himself. He didn’t want to be discovered lurking on the grounds by a porter and taken for a pervert or stalker. In his day, the school had been down-at-heel but beautiful, with its ancient stone buildings, some going back to the fourteenth century, and its swaths of green lawn. Now it was only beautiful. Rupert had not been happy at Longleat; he’d been lucky. Seeing the place again reminded him again of the great debt owed his guardian. As a very young man, he hadn’t acknowledged all that Reverend Falkes had done for him. He was only twenty when the reverend died, too young to bear thinking of himself as a charity case. If I’d had to be grateful, he thought, I would have been deformed by it. At twenty, Rupert had wanted to think the reverend didn’t expect his gratitude or even desire it, but only looked to him to fulfill his early promise. Thirty-five years on, he felt sadness and regret, even as he absolved his younger self. All the unasked questions, the ones he had avoided, came with a rush: Why did he pick me out of the dust heap? Why do I have his name? What did I owe him? Did I thank him? Did he know I…? Rupert stanched the flow. The words “loved him” hung in the air. Rupert walked toward the chapel, Lear’s curse ringing in his ears: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” Evensong would start at five thirty. Rupert gave up God early, about the time Eleanor gave up Santa Claus, but he held to the Anglican rituals, his inheritance. God save the Queen, God help the poor.
When Harry was thirteen, he asked his parents whether he should go to boarding schools. They were all at dinner. Friends of his wanted to go away, to Andover, Exeter, Milton. “What do you think?” he asked his parents and brothers. Rupert was, to everyone’s surprise, against it. “Boarding schools are for orphans,” he said. “Children who have parents should stay home until university.”
The boys stared at their father. He had never before said anything to them so revealing. No one said anything.
Later that evening when they were alone, Eleanor followed up with Rupert.
“What is your grievance against boarding schools?” she said.
“They’re sexual cesspits, like prisons,” he said.
Eleanor stared at him. “What happened?” she said.
“You don’t want him to go away. Do you want him to go away?” Rupert said.
Eleanor reached out and touched his cheek. “No,” she said, dropping her query, knowing she’d never get an answer. “I am still attached to him. And I’m not finished with him.” She paused. “Neither are his brothers. He can’t leave home until one of them takes him down a peg. I’m betting on Sam. The others haven’t the stomach for it.” She was too optimistic. To her frustration and admiration, Harry resisted all takedowns, bouncing back like a punching bag. As he forgave his own trespasses, he mostly forgave others theirs, never offering a proper apology, never expecting one.
“I underestimated him, his resilience, his self-confidence, his willed blindness,” she said to Rupert years later. “Where did he get that from?”
“My side,” Rupert said.
“It’s my mother, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “Or maybe my father.”
Rupert invited Will to go with him to Chichester. “We’ll walk around. No knocking on doors.” Rupert knew no one from his St. Pancras days. He had left the orphanage at seven, when he went to the Prebendal, and he had never returned to it. During holidays, he stayed in the rectory, in a small room in the staff quarters. The church was still there, looking like its old flint self on the outside but so much smaller than Rupert remembered. Inside, the changes distressed him. Renovations in the early 1980s—adding on a large recreation room, replacing the pews with chairs, taking down the altar—gave the sanctuary the look of a middle school auditorium. “It’s Low Church, practically Methodist,” Rupert said to Will. “Father Falkes wore a cassock. I used to wonder if he had grown up a Catholic and changed the spelling of his name, dropping the w, adding the l, when he took Anglican orders. I think he would have liked to shrive his parishioners. He would
have hated the guitars.” The orphanage was now the Parish Hall. A brochure said it had closed in 1958. “Father started it during the Depression,” Rupert said, “after several infants had been left on the steps of the church. I don’t know what happened to the girls.”
“Did you ever think about your parents?” Will asked.
“No, not then,” Rupert said. “When your whole world as a small boy is made up of orphans, you think you’re normal. When I went off to the Prebendal, Father explained that the children there would likely have parents, a mother and father. ‘Tell them what you want,’ he said. ‘Don’t lie if you can help it.’ I said I had been orphaned. I hated the word ‘orphan.’ I don’t know why Father Falkes singled me out. He wasn’t my father. I’ve read Great Expectations.”
“What was it like to be at a boarding school at seven?” Will asked. “You were so little.”
“Being an orphan provided me with an early advantage,” Rupert said. “I didn’t miss my mother. ‘How come you don’t cry?’ a classmate asked. I told him I never cried. This was true.” He laughed. “Another child asked me why I called my dad ‘Father Falkes’ and not Daddy, or Papà or even plain Father. ‘Your parents must be very polite people,’ he said. I said, ‘Yes, Father Falkes is very polite. Very proper too. I haven’t got a mother.’ I looked down as if I were sad. I almost said ‘My mother is dead.’ That might have been a lie.”
“Were you ever interested in looking for your parents or their children?” Will asked. “Their other children?”
“No,” Rupert said. “Sometimes I imagine being contacted by a lost relation. ‘Rupert, how are you, old man? Sorry we had to give you up. Depression.’ That sort of thing. The thought fills me with suspicion and rage. What could any one of them be now but a cadger.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said.
“No, don’t be,” Rupert said. “Coming to America, I felt cast into Eden. I can’t imagine that any brothers or sisters I might have had are better off than I. I’m not talking about money, though it plays its part. I’m talking about Father Falkes, Cambridge, your mother, you five, Granddad, Yale, my work, West Sixty-Seventh Street, our life. I’ve no illusions about my origins. No family romance. Gypsies didn’t kidnap me. I’m not a Fitzroy or a Moses. I was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”