Studying this image, I’m struck by a kind of vertigo: the disorientation of an impossible point of view (like imagining yourself as a passerby on the street in someone else’s life; momentarily seen and then forgotten). But let me be clear about this. At least, let me try.
The young woman who occupies the third seat is about twenty years old. Her skin is so pale that it glows. Her black hair haloes her features, stray curls escaping from a shoulder-length braid. On her face there is an expression of—what? I can’t quite read it. Some intensity, some distance, as she looks past the photographer.
This is the photograph that I stumbled across by chance.
And, staring down at the monochrome surface, it feels to me as if I’m falling toward the scene it captures. That frozen moment and all the other moments, lost amid the blank spaces of history behind it: the hidden rooms and countless decisions that came together in this fragment of another life.
THE HORSE-DRAWN OMNIBUS lurches to a halt, metal-bound wheels striking sparks from the icy cobblestones. Peter shoves his way through the crowd of passengers, half dragging her to the door and down the steps. They cross the street, swirls of falling snow illuminated momentarily in the lanterns of passing wagons. Then suddenly the city ends and she is stumbling behind him over hummocks of frozen grass, through leafless trees and forest undergrowth.
They stop in a clearing inside a thicket of bushes, their breath rising in clouds of steam. For a few minutes they stand there, recovering from their headlong rush. After a moment she tugs her arm free and steps away from Peter.
“Where you going?” He straightens, watching her.
She glares back at him, still panting with exertion. Gradually the terror of their escape from the Morgan mansion has begun to recede, replaced by anger. She takes another step away, almost tripping over a half-buried root, and shivers. “That is not your concern.”
“Wait a minute.” Peter sinks down to crouch on the ground, beckoning for her to do the same. “Please.”
Silently she looks around. At the edges of the clearing is a tangle of undergrowth, bare except for a few ragged leaves. Above this, the branches of trees reach toward the night sky like skeletal arms. Farther away she can see the tops of buildings: a geometry of lit windows, pinnacles, and garrets that seems utterly disconnected from the woods around the two of them, a misplaced backdrop from another scene. Overhead, the stars are cold and bright and distant in the winter darkness.
She turns back to Peter. “What is this place?”
“Central Park.” He shrugs. “I was thinking more about getting away than figuring where we should go. Seemed as good a place to hide as any.”
“To hide,” she echoes, the significance of these words sinking in. “You think the police are looking for us?”
“Could be.”
She shivers harder. Looking down at the mechanic, and the wary expression on his face, she remembers his betrayal and with a sense of self-righteous injury wonders why she doesn’t simply walk away. But, glancing again at her surroundings, she admits to herself that she has no clear sense of another destination to which she might walk. She sits on the opposite side of the clearing from him, drawing up her knees and hugging her legs against her chest.
Peter climbs to his feet and crosses toward her, slipping off his coat. He holds out the rough woolen garment and she looks away. A moment later she feels the weight of the thing wrap around her shoulders like a cloak.
“Here,” he says. “Keep you warm.”
She closes her eyes, trying to make herself hate the mechanic. But even now—breathing in the scent of his body, which clings to the fabric of his coat—she finds herself imagining his embrace. She bites her tongue, struggling to banish the image.
When she looks up again Peter has moved away. As she watches, he gathers branches from the ground of the clearing, then kneels and carefully constructs a scaffolding of small sticks, tucking dried leaves into the lattice. He pulls a box of matches out of his pocket and strikes one, and a moment later a little blaze crackles to life between his cupped hands. After adding more fuel and wiping his palms on his trousers, he beckons her closer. She hesitates, then moves to sit across the fire from him.
“Won’t someone notice the light?” she asks.
“Not too likely.” He gestures at the surrounding woods and she realizes, peering through the underbrush now that her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, that dozens of other small fires are burning on all sides of their own, each circled by a group of shadowy figures. Without thinking, she inches closer to Peter.
Watching her pale features in the firelight, he wonders about how their two lives have gotten so tangled together. A week ago, Peter reflects, he would probably have just walked away and left her to look after herself. But now, even if she’d rather see him gone—a fact that has been plain enough, ever since their encounter with Morgan—leaving no longer seems possible. So instead he struggles to find some kind of answer for the accusing look on her face.
“Listen,” he starts, hesitatingly. “I didn’t—that is, I never—”
As she watches him fumble for words she feels a kind of pity for the mechanic. Still, she sits silently and waits, remembering how she has been wronged.
Instead of continuing, though, he abruptly stiffens and clambers to his feet, staring at something beyond the light of the fire. She follows his gaze but sees nothing in the flickering shadows.
“You there,” he calls. “Come out!”
She waits, heart pounding, and for a moment nothing happens. Then a small shape detaches itself from the darkness and moves toward them. It is a child, she realizes: a boy dressed in ragged, too-large clothes, his features smudged with grime and flaking scabs. The boy looks at them, picking his nose uncertainly, poised for flight.
“You want to earn a dollar?” Peter asks.
The boy hesitates, then nods.
“You know the Lower East Side?”
Another nod.
“I need you to go there, give my friend a message,” Peter says. “You go there, then come back and tell us what he says.”
The boy considers this. “Where’s the dollar?”
Peter reaches into his boot and pulls out a crumpled bill. The boy starts forward, hand outstretched, but before he can take the money Peter tears the bill in two, stuffing half into his pocket and offering the other half to the boy.
“You get the rest when you come back.”
The boy contemplates the torn paper in his grubby hand.
“Where’s your friend live?” he asks finally.
She listens while Peter relays a set of meaningless directions, trying to decide whether this might be yet another betrayal. But even if it is, she thinks wearily, she cannot imagine what her other choices might be. The boy wipes his nose on his sleeve and disappears into the darkness, and Peter sits down again beside her.
“There’s someone we can stay with, maybe,” he explains. “Know him from the subway. Should be safe there, if he’ll let us.”
She nods, pulling the coat more tightly around her shoulders, and both of them stare into the flames for a time without speaking. All around them the hollow loneliness of night and things they haven’t said. He half rises, adds another branch to the fire, then returns to sit beside her.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About Morgan. About all of that.”
Some part of her has been waiting for him to say this, she recognizes. But strangely, with these words, her temporarily forgotten anger flares up again.
“It was a mistake,” he continues clumsily. “I didn’t mean—”
“A mistake? How? Did they pay you?” Even before he starts to deny it, she sees the answer on his face. “How much was it?” she demands.
“I never thought—” he begins.
“Are you really so naïve as that?”
He doesn’t answer.
“How much did they pay you?” she presses. For some ugly reason, it feels important for her to know. “Tell me
, how much?”
Peter hesitates. “A hundred dollars,” he lies.
“A hundred dollars—is that all I’m worth, then?”
“I’m sorry. Guess that’s all I can say.” Peter turns back to the fire, his jaw set in a stubborn line. “Guess I thought it was better than you sitting in jail.”
Without warning, the momentary blaze of her indignation collapses, leaving only a gray husk of futility. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, she thinks. None of this.
Peter is staring ahead blankly, turning a piece of wood between his hands. A meaningless gesture, the chunk of wood over and over, stray sparks rising from the flames into the darkness. Feeling suddenly very alone, she reaches out and touches his hands, stilling their motion.
“In any case,” she says, “I suppose you did save us both, in the end.”
He looks up at her and she experiences a moment of dizziness, seeing her own expression mirrored in his eyes. The same mingling of uncertainty and hope. Embarrassed, she smiles at Peter and drops her gaze.
“Tell me,” she asks, feeling the need for conversation to fill the charged silence between them, “how was it that you became interested in mechanics, to begin with?”
He stares at her for another few seconds, then shakes his head. “Guess it was my father. Out there in the mountains, in Idaho, he was always tinkering with something.” Peter glances at the chunk of wood in his hands before tossing it into the fire, fumbling as always for a way to put the thing into words. “It was a hard place. But something about those gadgets made me feel like maybe it was all for a reason. Like it all made sense somehow, if you know what I mean.”
He shoots her a sidelong glance, and is surprised to find her nodding agreement. “How about you? Haven’t met a lot of ladies who study math and science, all that.” In fact, he silently admits, he hasn’t met other ladies—not real ones, in the proper sense—at all.
Crouched inside the folds of his coat, she shuffles nearer to him, extending her palms toward the glowing embers. Tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, she smears a line of soot across her cheek, and it costs Peter an almost physical effort to keep from reaching out to touch the small black mark.
“I must have been eleven or twelve years old,” she says, speaking slowly. “It was not long after my mother died. I had a tutor—Mr. Driggs—who was passionate about botany.
“He had given me a sunflower to study, and I remember counting the florets at the center of the flower. They grow in a spiral, and at a certain point I realized something about the number of florets in each ring. There was a shape to them, a progression to their growth: three in the first ring, then five, then eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four—”
“It’s totaling up the numbers,” Peter breaks in, “isn’t it? If you add the first and second you get the third number, then the second and third numbers to get the fourth—”
“Exactly. The Fibonacci sequence, although of course I did not know it at the time. When I told my tutor he became very excited and gave me a book on mathematics.” She shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “When I read those books it was as if I’d already known everything inside them, and had simply forgotten. As if I were remembering these things, rather than learning them for the first time. And I suppose the rest, as they say, is history. . . .”
She leans toward the fire, and as she does the pendant that Peter glimpsed in the subway workshop slips out of her dress. She reaches up, running her fingers over its surface, and Peter sees that it is shaped like a circle of leaves or cornstalks, enclosing a letter T.
“That stand for Toledo?” he asks.
She looks down, seeming to realize for the first time what her hand is doing, and nods. “It is the emblem of my family. The Royal House of Toledo. At least, it used to be.”
He bends closer and she holds up the pendant for his inspection. Heavy silver, faintly tarnished, the green of some distant Ohio frozen in old metal. The warmth of her breath against his cheek.
For an instant Peter closes his eyes—then, becoming abruptly aware of his unshaven face and the sourness of his breath, pulls away.
“Royal House of Toledo,” he repeats helplessly. “Guess all of this must be pretty different for you.” He gestures, encompassing their makeshift campsite, his own dirty clothing, the world in general.
She begins to answer with an empty politeness, but stops herself. Instead she pauses, looking around at the frozen dirt and bare branches, at the concern and possessiveness on the mechanic’s care-worn face.
It strikes her that, until these last weeks, she has lived in an impossibly small universe, willfully blinded to the vastness of existence outside of her chosen life. And perhaps, she thinks, this is how everyone lives. Perhaps it is exactly these blinders that the complacency and comfort of our days depends upon: we survive by shutting out the endless questions of what else might be. Only now—she glances at Peter again—that larger world, and all the strangeness it contains, has been made undeniably real.
Peter takes her silence as a kind of answer and gropes for a question—feeling somehow that if only he could find the right thing to ask, everything about this situation and her, about the two of them, would come clear. But he can’t find, or isn’t ready to hear, this final thing. So they sit silently for a time.
“You must miss Ohio,” he says finally.
In fact, a week ago, she would have agreed without a second thought: all she had hoped for, in those first days of disorientation, was that lost world. But now she shakes her head. “My life there . . .” She gropes for words. “I was a kind of prisoner in my father’s house. We had everything—servants and cooks. I think that I never once stepped into the kitchen. Garden parties, dinners, dances. That was the extent of my intended life.”
“You were going to get married—be a lady and all that?” he asks, not wanting to hear the answer.
She registers the resignation on Peter’s face and with an inward shudder remembers the endless, ornate luncheons with eligible bachelors she had been forced to endure. The tedious conversations with well-bred young suitors who had nothing to say apart from singing their own praises: the patronizing smiles and questions about whether she preferred needlepoint or embroidery. She looks away from the mechanic. “Something like that.”
“And was there anyone—”
“Never,” she interrupts violently. “There was no one, apart from my father, who had any claim on me.” Except, she thinks, for Tesla, recalling the warmth and intensity of the inventor’s dark gaze, how he alone had taken her seriously and shown her the possibility of a different life. But even that attachment, she reflects, had been a kind of schoolgirl infatuation, although she did not know it at the time. Nothing like—
Looking at Peter’s face in the flickering firelight, she feels a sudden pressure in her chest and shakes her head again. Her heart has no business doing the things it’s doing now, she tells herself, expanding to fill her rib cage, fluttering in her throat—
Before she can find words to explain this, there is a rustling sound in the thicket and she looks up to see the ragged boy standing in front of them, panting hard.
“Saw your friend,” the boy gasps, wiping his nose. “He says, you come now.”
PAOLO’S APARTMENT is composed of three small rooms: the first, where she sits now at a wooden trestle table, functions as the dining room, living room, and laundry, a space cluttered with a decrepit secondhand sideboard, crude table and chairs, and a dented metal bathtub. Beyond this is the kitchen, which is also the pantry and the room where the children sleep behind the coal-burning stove. Past the kitchen is a windowless closet that Paolo and his wife call their bedroom.
She surveys this space, trying unsuccessfully to overhear the conversation between Peter and his friend as they confer in the hallway. Realizing that she is being watched, she turns to discover two little girls standing in the doorway to the kitchen, regarding her silently with dark eyes. She smiles at them, and is rewarded by
a pair of tentative smiles in return—until Paolo’s wife appears, scowling, to herd the girls out of sight with a stream of muttered Italian. Exhausted, she allows her mind to go blank, staring at the pattern of cracks in the peeling yellow-plastered walls.
“—set, then. Thank you.” Peter’s voice brings her back to herself, and she looks up to see him reenter with Paolo.
“Of course.” Paolo nods at both of them, his friendly tone at odds with the strained expression on his face. “You want some wine, something to eat?”
“A glass of wine would be lovely,” she says, “thank you.”
Paolo ducks into the kitchen and Peter sits across from her. A moment later the Italian returns with a bottle and two mismatched cups.
She smiles up at him. “Won’t you join us?”
“No, my wife—” Paolo shakes his head, seeming faintly embarrassed. “I must help her.” He disappears back into the kitchen, and she watches Peter as he pours for each of them. She takes a cup and sips the bitter, tannic red.
“So,” Peter says after a few silent moments have passed, “what happens now?”
She looks over at him, this simple question revealing in sudden sharp relief the depth of her uncertainty. A week ago, these answers were simple enough: vindication of her memories, proof of herself and the world that she has lost. Now, though, after the blankness of Tesla’s face upon their meeting and Morgan’s vision of destruction, these things feel strangely empty and irrelevant.
“I do not know.” She shakes her head and stands.
As she turns away, her hip bangs the edge of the table, knocking over the bottle of wine. Cheeks flushing red, she searches for a way to stop the spreading flood of dark liquid: anything absorbent, some rag. Her eyes light on the overflowing ashtray near the center of table—which is perfect, she thinks, like blotting wet ink with sand, and dumps the contents of the ashtray over the spilled wine. The crisis averted, she crosses the room to stand beside the window and draw aside the rough curtain, gazing at the city lights and darkness outside.
The Kingdom of Ohio Page 18