by Peter Murphy
Alternatively, I could, I suppose, just tell her that the whole idea of suing the government for whatever happened the best part of 250 years ago was crazy, and that she needed to forget about it and get on with her life doing Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that, and I knew that she wouldn’t take my advice even if I did.
‘Well, hun, that’s a good question,’ Arlene was saying. ‘I sure can’t think of anyone we know who would touch it. And that, right there, is why y’all shouldn’t touch this with a nine-foot pole. It’d be like taking a lame mule to the rodeo and calling it a quarter-horse. Now, you may get to the rodeo, but you ain’t about to rope yourself a calf.’
I called Sam and told her I needed another day to look at the papers, and asked her to come to the office the following afternoon.
8
I am in an office in a city. I think it is Philadelphia, but why I think that I’m not sure. It is a government office. The tired, dreary furnishings and untidy appearance of the place would never be tolerated in the office of a private entrepreneur who knew that his livelihood might depend on making his place of business attractive and welcoming to the public.
There is a counter, and behind the counter stands a young man who seems to be about thirty years of age, an official of some kind. His dress is drab and uncared for, his manner is one of boredom or indifference, and all in all he matches the appearance and atmosphere of the office exactly. In front of him on the counter are several documents, ink on parchment, in formal script, but because of I am too far away, I cannot read them.
In front of the counter stands an old man. His appearance has changed since I saw him in the house at the top of the hill, but I know it is Jacob. He has aged greatly; his body is thin, and I see that he is in pain and walks with the aid of a stick. Not only that, but there is a young woman with him who is giving him additional support for walking and standing. Her name is Isabel. How I know that, I cannot say. His clothing is worn, and he has no hat. He is in conversation with the young man, and their demeanor suggests that the conversation is not going well.
‘And I repeat, sir,’ the young man is saying, ‘that there is no gold to pay such claims. If it were a matter of twenty dollars I would pay you, but I have no authority to pay such sums as you claim, even if you were to bring me proof of them. The country is not yet recovered from the war.’
‘The war? The war has been over these twenty years,’ Jacob protests. ‘I doubt you were more than twelve years old at its end.’
The young man seems briefly amused by this.
‘You speak truly, sir. Yet our credit abroad is uncertain, and after the war the government caused such masses of currency to be printed that the value of our scrip is even today far less than that of a like amount of gold. There is much distress among the people, and we have as yet no guarantee of our security from our enemies.’
He pauses.
‘I beg you to understand, sir, that I have this from my superiors, not of my own knowledge. I have no such authority or position that I am privy to such matters myself. But my superiors tell me that such gold as we have must be expended for the public good.’
‘There would be no public good,’ Jacob exclaims, ‘except such as the King of England would allow us, unless I and others like me had saved the General and his army from ruin when he camped at Valley Forge. It was after that winter that the war began to turn in our favour.’
‘Be that as it may, sir, you bring me no proof of the debt owed to you. The Congress stipulated that those who loaned their gold were to be issued certificates which stated the amount thereof, and on presentation of those certificates to this office, they should be recompensed with the interest allowed by the Congress.’
He points to the documents in front of him.
‘When you last came to me, you asked that I make a diligent search of the office. I have done so. The documents I found, you see before me. Two certificates I have from gentlemen I believe to be your brothers, one for some twenty-five dollars and the other for some forty. These were presented to this office and the amounts were repaid to them.’
‘I have told you of my proof, both on the last occasion I came here and on this occasion,’ Jacob replies in a loud voice. He is angry now. ‘I was instructed by the General himself to retain my certificates until such time as he had ensured the repayment and to submit them with a letter indicating his interest in the matter.’
‘Yet you say you have not retained them?’
He is getting bored and frustrated with this discussion, and wants only to get rid of Jacob in any way he can. Jacob is also frustrated.
‘Sir,’ Isabel reminds him quietly, ‘you dealt with another officer when you yielded the certificates. You must explain to this gentleman why you did so.’
‘I have explained…’ Jacob replies.
‘Yet you must do so again. Be patient, sir, I beg you.’
‘Very well,’ Jacob agrees. ‘‘You must understand, sir, that when I first came with my certificates I spoke with another officer, your senior in rank – you will forgive me, sir, I mean no offense by this.’
‘I take none. When came you?’
He looks at Isabel.
‘Fully fifteen years ago,’ she replies.
‘More, I think,’ Jacob says. ‘Before our Treasury removed from Philadelphia to the new District. Notwithstanding, I brought with the certificates a letter, as General Washington had instructed me, indicating his surety for me in this matter, which letter was to be placed before the highest officers of state for their consideration.’
‘Then, that could not be done in this office.’
‘So I was advised. The officer with whom I dealt proposed to take the certificates and the letter with him and to present the same to the high officials who must see them.’
‘No doubt that was done?’
‘I have no intelligence whether it be done or not. I know only that I am not repaid. I have returned to this place to inquire many times, and am met with the same response, that the officer now in charge has no information, and must make inquiries in the Treasury. Then, when I return again, it appears that no one in the Treasury has intelligence of it. The certificates and my letter are nowhere to be found, as if they are vanished into the air, spirited away by some malicious hobgoblin.’
The officer shakes his head.
‘I know not what I may do, sir.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Did this officer, with whom you dealt, offer you no receipt for the documents you gave him?’
Jacob hangs his head, and does not reply for some time.
‘I thought not to inquire for one,’ he admits. ‘It was foolish of me, perhaps. But I believed I was dealing with men of honour, who would deal with me honourably, just as the General had. I would believe it of them still, but I must tell you that my confidence has waned, and I no longer know whether I believe it.’
‘I will report the matter to my superiors, sir. I can do no more.’
‘I had the word of the General himself. He would have pursued my cause. He undertook to do so.’
‘President Washington is deceased these ten years and more, sir.’
‘Notwithstanding. I had his word.’
‘I can do no more, sir.’
My clock radio is telling me what the weather will be in the DC area for today. It is time to get up. I make coffee. I call Arlene, and tell her I will be late in this morning. I call Arya, and ask whether I can come to see her and talk. Of course I can, she says, without asking any questions of me.
As I am getting ready to leave my apartment, it suddenly occurs to me that it has been more than twenty-four hours since I last thought about Jordan.
9
Arya sits me down in my favourite chair with her Neroli incense and a cup of herbal tea. She says little at first, but carefully looks me up and down, and eventually
pulls up a low stool so that she can sit at my feet. I know what’s about to happen. It’s another of those things I have a word for in my mind – reflexology – but it’s a word I have never actually applied to Arya, because like everything else she does, it is just part of who she is, one of the labels I will never stick on her. I brace myself as she picks up my feet and holds them in her lap, because I know what’s coming. Part of it will feel like a good strong massage – which of course I love – and part of it, when she finds a sensitive point and deliberately digs into it with those powerful fingers of hers, will hurt like hell. But I have been through it before, I have never protested, and I always feel better for it afterwards. Not always at the time, but always afterwards.
As she probes my feet and they start to get twitchy, I tell her about Sam, and about Jacob van Eyck, and about loan certificates, and about class actions, and about the money and time they consume. She has reached a point on the sole just beneath my big toe, and goes in as deep as she can. I almost scream. I grab the arms of the chair as tightly as I can.
‘It’s OK, Kiah,’ she purrs. ‘Breathe. Nice and slow.’
It’s all I can do to breathe at all, let alone nice and slow.
‘My, you are tense this morning,’ she says. ‘Come on. Breathe. Stay with me. Breathe.’
She goes in again. It’s still very painful, but not quite so much this time. My breathing does actually begin to develop a bit of a rhythm.
To take my mind off the pain, I start to tell her about the dreams. She was listening before, but I feel an increased attentiveness now. After a third prod, noticeably less painful, she reverts to a massage of both feet while I am trying to describe where my mind has been going the last two nights. Suddenly, something releases in my shoulders and I somehow feel lighter. I quickly lift and lower my shoulders several times, and find that I am breathing more deeply.
‘Do you want to take her case?’ she asks.
‘I don’t see how I can. Arlene said it all yesterday. It would cost a fortune to take it all the way to trial, the government would fight us every step of the way, and the chances of recovering anything would be almost non-existent. To say nothing of the fact that I would have to neglect my other clients to devote the kind of time this case would demand. I don’t know what to do except to refer it out, but I don’t even know what kind of a law firm would take it.’
Her hands came to rest for a moment.
‘Kiah, I didn’t ask whether it is practicable for you to take it. I asked whether you want to take it.’
‘If I could? If money and resources were no problem? Then would I want it?’
‘That’s what I’m asking.’
I closed my eyes. It wasn’t a simple question. I felt as though I were being invited to step into quicksand. I was still on solid ground for now, but that could change in a flash if I just decided to jump. I was watching the solid ground disappear, and part of me wanted it back. There was a part of me that wished I could go into the office this morning and find that all the documents had magically disappeared from my conference table; that Sam and Jacob van Eyck were just as much a dream as the house on the hill and the office with the young official. But there was also a part of me that, for reasons I did not understand, wanted to be a part of this, and there was something about the dreams that was pulling me in.
There was something else, too, which Arlene didn’t know when she gave me her obviously sage and sensible advice the previous afternoon. It was true that the practice was just starting up again, and that our bank balance and cash flow weren’t in the most healthy of states. But I did have some money. It was money I desperately wished I didn’t have, but I had it, and that was how it was. My parents had done well in the practice of medicine over many years, as had their parents before them. They had money, and they had an expensive house in East Falls Church they had bought for their retirement. I was an only child, I was their sole executor, and I inherited everything except for a generous cash bequest to Arya and a few smaller ones to relatives. It was a simple enough probate, and I had already wound up and distributed the estate except for the sale of the house. It didn’t mean that I could afford to be reckless, but it did mean that I was not entirely at the mercy of my practice for my living. There were a few chances I could afford to take. I felt Arya reading my mind.
‘What do you think the dreams mean?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
Wrong answer. You don’t tell Arya that dreams may mean nothing, that they may be no more than the imaginings of an over-active mind while the body is trying to rest. She will just listen politely and ask you again. Besides, dreams – or nightmares, anyway – had been an ongoing topic of conversation between us since the Week. Since then, nightmares had been a constant in my life: I regularly suffered with disturbing dreams about my parents and about Jordan, and even though their meaning seemed obvious to me, Arya would encourage me to look deeper, to go into the detail of the dreams, what things were emphasised – especially about Jordan. Then she would ask me what I had learned from them. Other than the obvious lesson that men couldn’t be trusted – which, for some reason, always made her laugh – I usually couldn’t come up with much. But I did actually begin to understand that there were certain recurring features of my nightmares, and once I brought those into consciousness, they began to subside, not going away altogether, but reducing in intensity and losing their power to some extent. I had even regained some ability to turn over and go back to sleep. Once the crying and shaking stopped.
‘I don’t know,’ is another thing you don’t tell Arya when discussing dreams.
‘Yes, you do.’ Stock reply, delivered with assurance and without hesitation.
‘I suppose there’s a part of my mind that’s already involved with the case, which is speaking to me. It can’t be anything conscious.’
‘No. Your conscious mind is too busy worrying about the law, and the technical aspects of it all, and how on earth you would ever manage a case of that size, and who you could offload it to, and all the rest of it. Which is fine. That’s the conscious mind’s job. So your subconscious mind has to feed you information, and dreams are one way of doing that.’
I nodded. ‘OK. That makes sense.’
‘Good. So what information is your subconscious mind giving you?’
I thought for some time.
‘That it is real to me; that it is something I want to do. I never dream about cases, Arya, never. This is something I apparently care about. It seems crazy…’
‘Why should it be crazy?’
‘I only heard about Jacob van Eyck a couple of days ago. I know almost nothing about him, or about the case Sam thinks she has. I haven’t had time to digest all this, much less form a burning desire to take up her cause.’
‘You know what I’m going to say about time, don’t you?’
I laughed. ‘Of course I do. Time is an illusion, the greatest illusion of all; which is why in our language we use the same word to mean both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”.’
She laughed too. ‘Yes. You’ve been to India. Look, you’re standing at a bus stop in Shimla, waiting for a bus that should have arrived twenty minutes ago. You ask someone when the bus will come. What does she say?’
‘She says the bus will come in one hour.’
‘And what does she mean by that?’
‘The bus will come any time between now and never. The one hour is just to be polite; she doesn’t want to discourage you. Besides, if it never comes, life goes on, you die and you are reborn, and the great wheel of Lord Shiva continues to turn, so what does it matter if the bus never comes?’
‘Exactly. You may have known about this case all your life, or before your life began.’
I would never have this conversation with anyone other than Arya, or if I did, I would discount it instantly. But with Arya, I just absorb it.
&nb
sp; ‘All right. Let’s say I want it. That still leaves us with the problems.’
‘Yes, but problems look different when you know you want something, don’t they? They are hurdles to be overcome instead of excuses for running away from it.’
She looked at me.
‘And you do have some resources.’
I bristled. ‘Arya, I can’t use my parents’ money for this.’
‘Why on earth not?’
I didn’t really have an answer for that.
‘It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s money they worked hard for all their lives. They left it to me so that I could… well, I don’t know… improve my life.’
She squeezed my feet.
‘And doing something you want isn’t improving your life?’
I smiled.
‘Kiah, listen to me. I have known you ever since you were born, and I knew your parents for much longer. And I know two things. One, you won’t squander your money. You’re a hard-headed girl, and you’re not going to just let it all go. You’ll use it responsibly, not let it use you. Two, your parents gave you that money so that you could live well. And there is no better way to live well than to do what you love.’
‘So you’re saying I should do it?’
‘I’m not saying anything. The only thing that matters is what you say.’
She walked me to the door.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s true that you have no other resources. Actually, I expect you will have more than enough.’
‘Not from Sam,’ I said. ‘She’s a repertory actress, and she hasn’t mentioned any family money.’
‘No. But didn’t you say there must be many members of the family who are entitled to claim?’
I nodded.
‘How many? Do you know?’
‘I haven’t tried to work it out, but there must be thousands.’
‘Well, there you are. Surely, there will be many of them who want to help? If they hope to benefit from the case, it’s not unreasonable that they contribute something, is it?’