Adelaide was watching me. “Troubling, aren’t they? Those last pages?”
“What are they?”
She ignored the question. “I was interested in what you said at that dinner, about how when we die everything evaporates. I think that was the word? It resonated with me. I try to pay attention to resonance.”
I remembered saying that, but I didn’t know what else I could add. “Honestly I think I was annoyed at that Leanne woman and trying to seem deep.”
“Don’t brush your thoughts off as imposture,” she said sharply. “It’s tiresome.”
“Sorry,” I said, taken aback.
“Don’t apologize, either. Especially since you know from experience. Your parents. You aren’t just blathering. You know exactly how much gets lost.” One of the dogs was resting its head in her lap, and she stroked its ears. She looked at me slantwise with her glinty, mineral flicker. “It must be much worse for you, but people think they know about me because I’ve been around and have been written about and so on. Almost no one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please.”
“Oh my god, yes,” I said, leaning forward. “And they come up with ideas about you that make sense to them and so seem true to them but are actually arbitrary.”
“Yes, exactly. Like constellations. It’s impossible to ever fully explain yourself while you’re alive, and then once you’re dead, forget about it—you’re at the mercy of the living.” She pointed at the sketchbook in my lap. “My mother said Jamie told her he filled those last pages during a battle. He thought he was making realistic sketches and only discovered later that they were scribbles.” She sipped her tea. The mug was green ceramic, like the fireplace tiles. “I’m glad he didn’t make the drawings he thought he did. They would have been lies. Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.”
“I don’t completely follow,” I said.
“All I’m saying is that it’s good some things are lost. It’s natural.”
“But you still want to show me that,” I said, indicating the document box, “rather than letting them be lost.”
“Yee-ess.” She stretched out the word, maybe with uncertainty. “I don’t know if it’s so much that the letters fill in gaps as expose them.”
“Well, like I said on the phone, I can’t really change anything about the movie. Especially not now. We’re almost done.”
She waved a hand. “The movie is just another obfuscation. The truth is worthwhile in its own right.”
“Totally,” I said, oddly relieved. “It took me a long time to figure out that the movie doesn’t really matter, but once I did, I could finally—I don’t know—act.” I paused. “I should tell you,” I said, “I told Redwood you have Marian’s letters. He wants to read them.”
“Do you want him to read them?”
“No.”
“Then he doesn’t need to,” she said. “I’ve chosen to show them to you, specifically you, but, like I’ve said, my purpose isn’t necessarily for them to be made public.” She seemed to muse. “I wonder if I’m enacting a kind of installation.” Then, mockingly: “Maybe this is my first stab at performance art.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I didn’t tell Redwood about Jamie being your father, either.”
“Biological father. No, I assumed I would have heard from Carol by now if you had. Why didn’t you?”
Now I mused. Redwood and I had come back from Denali and gone to bed together, and it had been perfectly fine, perfectly nice, but I hadn’t been able to shake that precarious feeling, like something was about to give way. “At first I thought I was just being possessive,” I said, “but I think maybe it was more that I’ve had stuff about myself, information, get launched out into the world—or I’ve done the launching—and I’m not sure what difference it makes, how much strangers know about you. They still don’t know anything. So it doesn’t matter how much truth there is in Peregrine. Like maybe it’s better if it’s just a movie.”
“Out of curiosity, what do you have left to film?”
“We’re going to Hawaii with a skeleton crew to pick up a couple of location scenes, and then the plane crash is the last thing.”
“It’s almost like some kind of confrontational New Age therapy, you filming a scene where a plane crashes into water.”
“Maybe it’s performance art.”
“Ha. Well, if you’re going to Hawaii, you should look up the kid who was raised by Caleb Bitterroot. He’s old now like me, but I’m pretty sure he still lives in the same house on Oahu where Marian stayed during the flight. We send Christmas cards.” I had trouble imagining this woman sending a Christmas card. “His name’s Joey Kamaka,” she said. “I met him once, when I went to see Caleb.”
Stupidly, I repeated, “You went to see Caleb? Marian’s Caleb?”
“I went through a whole seeking phase in my twenties. I’d known my dad wasn’t my biological father since I was fourteen, but I hadn’t really tried to face it. So then I did try.”
After my uncle Mitch died, I’d come home from New York to go through his house before selling it, and I’d found a folder of letters from my father. We make each other miserable, my father had written about my mother before I was born, but we’ve decided we prefer our particular misery and the euphoria of our reconciliations to steady bovine contentment.
The letters turned even bleaker after I was born, as my father realized a baby wasn’t going to solve their problems. I don’t know why anyone thinks babies will make literally anything easier. Reading his words—hearing his voice, in a way, for the first time—I’d started wondering if my father had crashed the plane on purpose. Later, when I hired that P.I. to look into the crash, I’d asked him if he thought a murder-suicide was possible, and he’d said, sure, anything was possible. But then he added that, in his opinion, if that’s what my father had done, he’d have brought me along, too. These guys usually do the whole family, he said.
I said to Adelaide, “How did you find out that Jamie was your…”
“Biological father? My parents told me. My brothers were gone to college by then, and they just sat me down and came out with it. My dad was a doctor. He’d been a medic in Europe when I was conceived. The story wasn’t particularly dramatic. Jamie passed through Seattle during the war, and he and my mother reconnected, as they say. It was a fling. She wrote to my father as soon as she learned she was pregnant and told him everything. He was a very understanding man. He loved her, though I imagine my existence strained things. She wrote to Jamie, too, but he was already dead. So, eventually, she wrote to Marian, but the letter took a while to find her.”
I said, “I watched that documentary about your project with the sunken boats—”
“Boat-like objects.”
“Was that about Jamie?”
“I didn’t want to think so at the time. I called it Sea Change. Do you know that verse, from The Tempest? ‘Full fathom five thy father lies.’ ”
I didn’t know.
“ ‘Of his bones are coral made,’ ” she said. “ ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’ ” She smiled wryly. “You can’t help being seduced by the image. I think it’s less about the body and more about how our imagination does its best to contend with death, and fails.”
I thought about holding the Cessna’s yoke in my hands like it was a bomb. I thought about crashing a fake plane into a fake ocean, the fade to black. I asked, “What was Caleb like?”
“Charming, drank a little too much. I only spent a few days with him. He could be boisterous and then suddenly cloud over. He’d clearly loved Marian, but he didn’t seem like the loss had devastat
ed him. Sometimes he even talked about her in the present tense, which made me wonder if he’d ever really internalized her death. Or maybe he’d just known so many people who died. I don’t know. He and I talked more about Jamie than Marian. Like I said, though, you should look up Joey Kamaka. He might know more.”
“I still don’t understand why me, though. Why don’t you want to do it? Why do you think I should?”
“It’s not the way I look for truth, personally, piecing information together. It depresses me. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the truth. As far as why you, I don’t know that, either. It’s just an idea that got into my head. The connections appeal to me. You playing Marian. Your parents.” She lifted the document box onto her footstool, removed the lid. “Take a look.”
“I might run to the bathroom first,” I told her. “Where is it?”
I was thinking I’d pee and then just go right out the front door, not look back, not take on the responsibility of deciding what to do with whatever was in the letters, not continue on as some pawn in Adelaide’s art installation, but when I came out of the bathroom, revving up for my escape, there on the wall staring back at me was Marian Graves, the original of the charcoal portrait I’d seen pinned up on the costume designer’s inspiration wall. Strange that it was real, an actual object in the world, something that could be framed and hung up. Her brother’s hand had made those lines, had summoned her face from a blank page.
I felt the abrupt onset of what can only be described as a hunch. There was something more that could be known, and I wanted to know it. There was something in Adelaide’s document box, and there was something beyond that, out in the void. I felt this like I’d felt the presence of the gigantic snowy landscape while I’d kissed Redwood.
I went back to the living room.
There’s some guy who surfaces every few years to say he’s spotted what might be the Peregrine in satellite images of Antarctica or that he’s found stuff on remote subantarctic islands that might be clues—bits of wreckage or an old lipstick tube he says is Marian’s or some bit of bone he says might be human and might be Eddie’s—and he promises that if people will just send him enough money he’ll go down there and solve the mystery once and for all. He one hundred percent promises he will.
Maybe I was turning into that guy. Maybe I was like the handful of wannabe sleuths who post blurry old photos online they claim are of Marian and Eddie in Australia in the 1950s or of the Peregrine refitted as a cargo DC-3 in the Congo. Maybe I was like the flat-earthers who think Antarctica is an ice wall around the earth’s perimeter and believe the Peregrine was shot down by the air force to stop Marian from discovering the truth. They all had hunches, too. They all desperately needed to feel like truth-tellers, to believe in their breakthroughs and revelations. Maybe I was a crackpot or a charlatan; maybe I was just trying to insert myself into an inscrutable, long-concluded drama.
Or maybe the past had something to tell me.
I sat on Adelaide’s couch and wearily, almost against my will, reached for the box of letters.
The Flight
Where to begin? At the beginning, of course. But where is the beginning? I don’t know where in the past to insert a marker that says: here. Here is where the flight began. Because the beginning is in memory, not on a map.
—marian graves*
New York City
40°45ʹ N, 73°58ʹ W
April 15, 1948
0 nautical miles flown
Matilda Feiffer, nearly seventy, ten years a widow, walks at a clip along Forty-Second Street. She wears all black, not to mark her widowhood but because she likes the severity. Narrow black skirt, nipped-in black jacket with an enamel brooch of a leopard on the lapel, black pumps, black beret over steel gray bob, enormous round glasses with heavy black frames. One bony hand, flashing with rings and bracelets, holds a tiny frothy white dog against her chest.
When Lloyd died, no one had been more surprised than Matilda to learn that her husband had left her not only the entirety of his fortune but also as much authority over his businesses as he could bequeath. To freely do with as she sees fit.
Clifford, her second son, an incompetent, had been the only one to rant and rage, perhaps because he knew he was the least deserving of the four living Feiffer boys. Lloyd, more sentimental than she, had let Clifford be at least nominally in charge of their shipping interests, which, even well insulated from real power, he’d made a hash of. So she had fired him as soon as she could. She hadn’t put him out on the street, of course, but had given him a great deal of money, warned him there would be no more, and encouraged him to go abroad somewhere and embrace a life of relatively economical debauchery. (She suspected Lloyd had left her in charge partly because he’d known she would do the things he could not bear to.) Clifford had moved to St. Thomas and married a Caribbean girl and had three children with her, but Matilda refused to give him the satisfaction of being scandalized.
Henry, the oldest and brightest of her sons, had already been a vice president of Liberty Oil before Lloyd’s death. This was by far their largest company, and she’d left well enough alone. Forty-six now, he was married to a woman Matilda didn’t disdain and had four sons of his own.
Bless Henry.
Robert, third in line, also worked at Liberty Oil. He was neither brilliant nor burdensome, was polite in company but did not shine, had never married though he was forty-three. She suspected Robert might be a queer.
Next would have come Leander, whatever sort of man he might have been if not for diphtheria.
Then there was George, dear Georgie, the baby, grown from the dark soil of her grief for Leander, only twenty-four when Lloyd died, her only son to go to war, now finishing up his doctorate in geology at Columbia, married to a nice girl and with two children. Her gratitude he’d survived the Pacific felt as boundless as the cosmos. She could not have endured losing another son, and the war had killed Lloyd, she knew. Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, and he’d died days later, at seventy-four, of a heart attack on his way to work. Matilda suspected his heart simply couldn’t withstand the magnitude of fury he’d felt at his father’s country.
So many women in black veils at his funeral. Matilda had tried to sort out which had been her husband’s mistresses but had given up in rueful exasperation.
It had taken some months for her to sort out Lloyd’s complex financial interests, fighting off incursions by rivals as she went. When she felt she had a firm grasp, she’d sold off some assets and reorganized others, and then she’d gone out and bought herself a struggling publishing house, D. Wenceslas & Sons.
“Why books?” Henry had asked. “Why not philanthropy? I know plenty of boards that would love to have you.”
“I like books,” she’d said. “I don’t care for boards.” Furthermore, she’d given birth to five sons and spent nearly forty years with a philanderer and was now free to do whatever she liked. Maybe that was why Lloyd had left her in charge. Maybe he’d been making one of his oblique apologies.
After Pearl Harbor, it had been her idea to print thousands of cheap paperbacks off the Wenceslas backlist and donate them to the troops. The gesture was one of genuine goodwill, but, as she’d thought might happen, the boys hadn’t stopped wanting books after they came home. Sales were strong. Thanks partly to her, paperbacks weren’t considered trashy anymore, just affordable and convenient.
She lives in an apartment near Bryant Park, and it is from there she has come when she swings abruptly off Forty-Second Street and through the glass doors of the building that houses Wenceslas headquarters. From the elevator she marches directly to her office, ignoring the greetings from the secretaries and typists that rise up like cheeps from birds’ nests. She’d chosen an office on the fifth floor with the editors, not the fourth floor with the sales and numbers types, and some of them can be glimpsed through their half
-open doors, always reading, sometimes reading and talking on the telephone simultaneously.
“She hasn’t canceled, has she?” Matilda asks her secretary, Shirley, who has followed her into her office. She tosses her beret onto a bookshelf and dumps the dog, Pigeon, unceremoniously onto the floor. On all available surfaces, piles of books rise above a general mess of paper: string-tied manuscripts, mock-ups of covers, clippings, correspondence.
Shirley sets down a silver bowl of water for Pigeon, retrieves the beret and places it carefully atop the hatstand. “No, not yet.”
* * *
—
Not long after Lloyd died, Matilda had found herself wondering about Addison Graves. She had a vague memory of Lloyd telling her Addison had been released from Sing Sing, but after that…nothing.
There didn’t seem to be anyone to ask. Even the longest-serving employees at L&O had no idea, and the lawyer, Chester Fine, was dead. When Addison was in prison, Lloyd had gradually stopped mentioning him. Matilda had taken the end of their friendship as a natural, sorrowful consequence of the loss of the Josephina and the uncertainty surrounding the dispersal of blame. Perhaps the courageous thing would have been for Lloyd to defend Addison more vocally, but he’d had an entire company to think about, thousands of employees. And what of the passengers and crew who drowned? Certainly their families required a—not a scapegoat. Certainly they deserved justice. That Addison’s odd young wife had perished was a tragedy, but at least the children had been saved.
“He never told you?” Henry said, inexplicably aghast. They were alone in the Liberty Oil offices, sitting opposite each other at a table heaped with files and ledgers.
“Told me what?”
And so Henry had relayed what his father had confessed about the smuggled crates of bullets and shells and nitrocellulose, about how Lloyd, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, had been the one responsible for the ship’s loss but had allowed Addison to take the fall. “He made little attempts to set things right,” Henry said, “but he would never come clean publicly, which was probably the only thing that would have mattered to Addison Graves. Sending that cargo was beyond foolish. It wouldn’t even have made a real difference to the war effort, of course. It was a symbolic gesture. And then he had to be ashamed until he died.”
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