We could have a child, Seymour said.
And Sister Gabriel: there are always the children, the thousands of homeless children.
She was passing a school playground and stopped to watch: steel grids on the windows, the walls daubed with graffiti, garbage rampant on a field of black asphalt — a tideline of candy wrappers, popsicle sticks, McDonald’s cardboard cups, beer cans. But flowering in all directions, irrepressible, the children.
A young mother, with coffee skin and a dandelion behind one ear, stood beside Felicity at the fence and called, “Anita! Anita!” She had a baby on her left hip, and on her head, balanced there like an extraordinary crown, a supermarket bag full of groceries. It might have been the most natural act in the world. Amidst the din and litter, in her cheap cotton shift and thin coat, she stood there like a frail and exotic orchid — something that blooms once every five years, say, in the unruly heart of a jungle. Felicity heard bellbirds, and the soft sibilant lift and dip of bamboo paddles. “Anita!” the woman called again, and a child ran to her. The incongruous burden on the woman’s head never trembled as she turned, a child at each side, and left the playground. Her back was straight as a young coconut palm. Her hips swayed. Felicity followed. She was chasing echoes. And Massachusetts Avenue, the filthy and wounded main artery of Central Square, budded greenly as a rain forest.
You win, Sister Gabriel, she murmured. You win.
She did not doubt that Sister Gabriel would receive the message.
There were preparations to be made, and certain things to be collected. She drove back to her old apartment.
36
An absence, whether from death or some other more final loss, calls forth compensatory action, we all know this. When the loss is not our own, we may raise an arch eyebrow. We may wink and murmur to one another of “overreaction” or “denial” or “sublimation”. Such words froth at the top of the mind, empty judgments. And with love it is the same: each case both unique and predictably banal, depending on the point of view.
For this reason I prefer not to discuss my feelings about Felicity, nor about Kathleen, up to, and following, the time of the police reports. This is not a diary. It is true that I have become personal here and there, that the report has strayed from the purely investigative and objective — I freely admit it — but for aesthetic reasons. For reasons of form.
Yes, the piano tuner has been seduced. He has the baton in his hand, the stage lights are on him, he refuses to scuttle into the wings. But he is also aware of the attendant responsibilities, the need for artistic rigour and direction.
And I realize it would not do to bore you with my nightly dreams of Felicity, nor with details of January’s falling in love with May. You believe you know all there is to know about such things, you have read it a thousand times, from Chaucer on, and who am I to improve on Chaucer? Your lip curls. Ho hum. They are always the same, these affairs. Consequently I gloss over a number of weeks: the books Kathleen read in order to discuss them with me; the concerts I took her to; the way she sat in empty rooms and listened while I tuned pianos; the way we talked so avidly about Felicity and Kathleen’s father. You remind me of him, she’d say. But I digress.
What is significant about those weeks is simply this: though we spoke of the absent ones constantly, we were in fact very much preoccupied with each other. During the crucial days we were oblivious; though once the police arrived, of course, retrospective remorse set in. And recrimination.
“If you’d told him I wanted to speak to him,” Kathleen says. “If you’d made him say where he was …”
But how could I have known, how could I possibly have been expected to know, which phone call would be the last?
“If you hadn’t told him what Felicity said,” she mourns. “If you hadn’t mentioned New York.”
Oh I quite acknowledge that my haziness about the timing and content of the last few phone calls is suspicious. Transparent, if you like. (We all know what amnesia is for.)
“They were both getting paranoid,” I said. “They both saw people waiting for them in every shadow.”
“Paranoid,” Kathleen sniffs. “I suppose their disappearance is an illusion? If you see a knife coming at you through the air, is it paranoid to duck?” But mostly she represses these dark misgivings. “He’s always been like this,” she laughs. “Mummy has always had irrefutable evidence of disasters, and he always turns up — slightly drunk but none the worse for wear.”
I hope there will not be any glib snickering about Kathleen’s way of protecting herself. I would like to point out that frequently, in the social history of mankind, compensatory action has not only taken on original and sometimes brilliant forms, but has been — in and of itself — beneficial to society.
Consider the piano in an abandoned summer palace of the Maharajah of Travancore. Felicity remembers it. Out of tune, of course. Even as a child with an untrained ear, she knew it. Monkeys chattering on the sounding board, rats gnawing away at the felt hammers, strings corroded, the whole instrument an arabesque of damp heaves. Over half the notes were silent. When she pressed them with a finger they said: och, och. Her ear became attuned: there were nuances in the ways the different mute keys said nothing. She was an inventive child, Felicity. It was the only piano available. She composed tunes that incorporated the silent notes, a sonata of glottal stops. All art, as Freud said, is compensation.
Or consider the castrati of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and even later. A cutting blow, you might think. Did they wither away because of their loss? On the contrary. Cropped but not crestfallen was their motto; the thorax is mightier than the sword. They bestrode the courts of Europe like giants, they towered over bass-voiced courtiers. Never forget that at the coronation of Napoleon in 1804, the voices of three hundred French choral singers and the strummings of eighty harpists were swamped, at the moment of the crowning, by the Pope’s thirty Sistine Chapel castrati. Tu es Petrus, sang those male sopranos, a mighty chorus.
“Now that,” Napoleon murmured to Josephine, “is a choir with balls!”
You see what can be done with loss?
The police do not understand this.
Evasion, they say. Prevarication. You are not telling us all that you know.
The police jingle facts like a handful of coins in a leather purse. Slow-thinking literalists, they tip the facts out on the table in front of you. “Look,” they say, picking one up. They hold it up to the light, they turn it around, they push it in front of your eyes. Fact, they say. As though it had magic properties. As though they have you squirming on a hook. Now how do you explain? they demand.
The truth is, I simply cannot remember the exact sequence, or the dates, or the content of the final phone calls. (I was preoccupied with Kathleen at the time.) I remember fragments, I remember images.
When I summon Felicity back from that time, I see a shadow tied to her heels. The shadow holds the shadow of a knife. Nothing is distinct. There is a vibrato of fear in her voice. (I think of Hester.) Also a dreaming quality. She was leaning back into the sun, there are flowers in her hair. Bellbirds called her. She spoke of villages, I’m sure she spoke of villages, and of children, thousands of children. Also of the children of Dolores Marquez. Yes, because I said, “You’re obsessed with that woman. And now Kathleen’s father believes he’s found her, for heaven’s sake.”
“Kathleen’s father?”
“Fliss, you never listen to me. Your border friend, Augustine Kelly, he has a daughter. Kathleen and I …”
“He’s found her?” There was a fevered edge to her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me? You said you didn’t have a clue where he was.”
“I did? Well that’s right, I don’t. He’ll never say. But every so often he calls in —”
“But he’s found her, that’s all that matters. Oh thank God!” She was very intense. I think she was in a pay phone in Harvard Square. I think she told me that. “You have to get a message to him,” she said. “You have
to tell him New York, it’s the only hope. And it’s very urgent. They know, you see, they have the address, it’s only a matter of time.”
“Look,” I said. “I have no idea when he’ll call. Besides, he’s mostly drunk and raving, so as far as your phantom refugee goes, I wouldn’t exactly —”
“You have to warn them,” she said. “You have to. It’s my fault, Jean-Marc. I gave away the photograph, I told, and I don’t want her deportation on my conscience. After Angelo, there’s no use pretending —”
“Fliss, you’re a bundle of nerves. Come up here for a visit. I’d like you to meet Kathleen. I want to know what you think.”
“It’s like a relay,” she said. “And Angelo has passed his obsession on to me.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In a pay phone in Harvard Square. I’m being followed.”
“You need to be looked after. If you left now, you could be up here in time for dinner.”
“I have to go home,” she said. “Seymour’s working too hard. I’m worried about him.”
“Don’t give him my love,” I snapped.
“Oh Jean-Marc,” she reproached. “I’ll talk to you later.”
But she never did.
I think I remember this exchange, but of course it could be retrospective invention. A logic imposed. One thing: it must have come before Gus’s call, or I wouldn’t have mentioned New York to him.
“Felicity?” Gus was clearly bewildered. Weeks of dereliction and booze had passed between his last thought of her and the present. “Oh, Felicity! No, why?” He sounded alarmed. “Look, I’m in a rush … I sent Kathleen a letter. I don’t suppose —”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. She paid a visit. She was looking for you. I must say, she’s —”
“Thank God. Will you give her a message? Tell her everything will be fine.” Listen, he said. He had to go into hiding, Dolores and he. But Kathleen was not to worry. He was being followed, he said, by some men he had seen before. There was no time to explain.
“About Dolores,” I said. “Felicity thinks Immigration knows —”
“Them and everyone else.”
“She says, if you could, New York is the only hope.”
“New York!” he laughed. “Christ, why New York? Why not the South Pole?”
About that line, I can be definite. A joker, Gus.
Of course I have gone over my memory like an archaeologist, I have dredged up phrases and pauses, I have wracked my brain for innuendos I might have missed. I chip away at amnesia. I go over my reconstruction with a magnifying glass. In the night I listen for commas and glottal stops. I explore the subtext, I am an expert on the buried layers of the sentence.
But as Felicity’s ayah used to say: Ivory will not grow in the rice paddy no matter how carefully you tend it.
Fact: the police say. They turn it in front of my face, they let it catch the light. It is one they have shown to Therese and Kathleen and Bob Wilberforce, to every fellow insurance agent in Winston, to a passel of clients, to the proprietor of Mister Donut. They take notes. They are gathering interpretations.
Fact: that a Chevrolet registered to Augustine Kelly crossed the border at the checkpoint nearest Winston, Ontario, heading south, at such and such an hour on such and such a night. Only one occupant, the driver.
Fact: a gas station attendant in Carthage, NY, remembers the Chevrolet and the driver. Also a female passenger.
Fact: that said Chevrolet was found irreparably smashed and charred in a roadside culvert between the towns of Carthage and Utica in upstate New York. (Here the police show photographs, they spell out: high speed, sharp turn, no sign of collision or foul play, gasoline inferno from impact.) Two bodies, unidentifiable.
I push the facts back across the table. Opaque, I say. They yield nothing to me. The police pocket them again. They take out their other purse, the one labelled Felicity. Their facts come spilling out.
“Your father says you were involved,” they tell me. “He hopes you may know more than he does.”
“Your father’s grief-stricken,” they add.
One of them is a policewoman, a blonde with killer lips. I look her straight in the eye. “Oh I bet he is,” I say. “Prostrate with sorrow, I should think.” She blushes and lowers her eyes.
They show their photographs of Felicity’s apartment building, the black remnants, the gaping holes. Arson, they say, fact. Impossible to identify the several victims, though some effort was made, dental records, that sort of thing, with whatever could be found in the rubble.
“Your father doesn’t believe she was in the fire,” they say. “He says she hadn’t been near her apartment for weeks. But her blue Datsun was parked outside it, and one of the survivors remembers seeing her entering the building. Can you tell us her whereabouts on the day of the fire?”
No, I can’t, I tell them. But my father’s right. She wasn’t driving her Datsun anymore, and she hasn’t been back to that apartment since the middle of the summer.
“But she was seen,” they insist.
The survivor must have been mistaken, I point out. Someone else must have driven her car, it had been tampered with by persons unknown before this. Besides, doesn’t it strike you as odd, these separate fires? All this destruction of evidence? Isn’t there something contrived …?
“We note that it strikes you as significant,” they counter. They are plodding literalists. “We note that you see a link. How often did the deceased meet in your house?”
The police have read too many spy thrillers, they live on a junk diet of television violence.
“We are keeping your answering machine,” they tell me, “as possible evidence. The tapes are highly suggestive.”
I don’t know of what, I tell them. Political discussions, they say. That makes me laugh. How do you explain the use of code names? they ask. I look at them blankly. Hunter, they explain. And La Magdalena. Tell us about the politics of your former stepmother and of Augustine Kelly, they say. (They have one-track minds, the police.) I am brief but polite: They had none.
“Then how do you explain the newspaper file?” they demand.
Now isn’t that curious? I thought Trog and Hunter had taken that file. I told them: She was a connoisseur of the absurd. She kept the file for philosophical and aesthetic reasons. But you can’t explain something like that to people like the police. There’s no point.
If I close my eyes I see Felicity moving among hot and dusty villages. She is wearing white. A large, floppy hat, with scarlet bougainvillea ribbons, is on her head. The ribbons are tangled in her long hair, which lifts and drifts in the breeze. She carries baskets of mangoes on her arms. Pied piper, the villagers call her. Children follow like flocks of doves, they clutch at her hands and skirt. She is walking away from me, she will not turn round.
Oh Jean-Marc, she’ll say when she calls. I meant to get in touch with you earlier. I’m sorry. I got involved.
I see no reason to tell any of this to the police, who, at long last, are leaving us more or less alone. All of their leads have gone nowhere.
They know no more than we do.
37
Sometimes on insomniac nights I move the police facts around like counters. I build bridges and theories. It’s like playing with a kaleidoscope: a set number of givens, a flick of the wrist or the mind, an infinite number of possible configurations.
Gus, for instance.
His eyes flicked constantly to the rearview mirror. He was watching for the Other Car, for the two men he had seen at Felicity’s cottage. He knew he did not dare to cross the border near Montreal (too closely watched for illegal aliens; his car known, perhaps, and associated with the meat truck from his last crossing); he would try at the checkpoint near Winston.
Don’t be silly, Kathleen says. Daddy would never think of complications like that.
True. So they must have tried to hide in the empty house at Winston, and then realized it was not safe. He decided to make for New York
, an innocuous border crossing on a business trip. He took precautions, he wore his one and only pinstriped suit.
“At the customs checkpoint,” he explained to Dolores Marquez, “you’ll have to hide on the floor in the back again. Under a sleeping bag. Same trick as last time. You remember?”
He knew she didn’t understand a word, but he had to talk out of nervousness. She stared at him wanly, her huge eyes trusting, uncomprehending.
“We’re in the same boat,” he told her. “My life is a shambles too. Though in my case, it’s my own fault.” Every set of headlights worried him, he drove as though he was trying to elude the air. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “my life has never been quite the same since I met you. The time I saw you … at least, I think I saw you, in the orchard …” He babbled on and on in English. His eyes lit up the road ahead. An invisible fire burned around him. He felt its heat. He glowed.
And at some point along the highway she began to talk. At first he thought he was imagining it. No one at Casa del Diablo had ever heard her say a word. She spoke, he supposed, in Spanish, a low monologue, exotic, like the sound of an Andean flute. He saw red dust and volcanoes, village churches, candles, an icon, an old woman’s face, young children. He saw village squares and adobe huts and soldiers. She knew he could not understand a word. It seemed to unlock something inside her. Her talk became wilder. Sometimes she sobbed as she talked. Once she screamed.
They sped steadily onwards. Every time headlights ruptured the dark highway, he expected the Other Car. Three times he thought it drew alongside, but nothing happened. He must have been mistaken. Near the border he stopped and Dolores Marquez climbed into the back and he covered her with a sleeping bag. They crossed without incident. Gus showed his driver’s licence, spoke of business in New York. The official never even glanced in the back. Gus rested an arm on his window, chatted, told a joke before driving on. They flew through upstate New York, they were taking back roads, a short cut, they would connect with the Thruway at Utica. By Carthage, they needed gas and food.
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