by Russ Rymer
The safe. I had avoided thinking about that armored presence crouching in its corner, simply because it was obdurate, and I don’t mean by that only that it was heavy for its size and refused to budge when I kicked it. The strongbox struck me right away as a stubborn problem hard to solve, and I had no use for another of those, I already had Willem. Now, with the solution glittering directly before me, the problem went from impossible to irresistible. I pulled the key off the nail, knelt down, and tried it in the key slot.
Nix. Right away I could see it was a no-go, male and female absurdly mismatched. But with the hunt initiated, I went to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while: search through the blue bowl of odds and ends wherein I’d found the mail key that first afternoon. I retrieved the bowl from the sock drawer—I’d stashed it next to Saxe’s yarmulke—and dumped its contents onto the divan’s counterpane. Here was all the predictable boy detritus: cuff links; a gold-filled wristwatch with a broken band; coins; an odd large medallion stamped with a spread eagle; more coins; a menthol inhaler; an old transit pass; a borrowing card for Bibliothèque St. Geneviève, expired; and amid it all, a leather pouch shaped like a teardrop and sealed with a zipper that gave a dull grating clink when I shook it and that released, when I opened it—bingo!—a gaggle of keys. They displayed the variety you’d expect of any worthy lifetime collection of mystery-keys-to-forgotten-doors. Two were skeletons, two others small enough they might have opened jewel boxes. One resembled the key I’d found in the closet, cast brass, unplated, its bow ornamented with a vine motif forming the letter W. Among them were several that looked like plausible candidates, and I swept up the entire menagerie and dove back into the closet to see what I could do. Surely one of these would work. It must!
Except that none of them did. Some fit the slot and wouldn’t turn, others not even that, and after I’d tried several a second time—out of disbelief, or to give luck a chance, or maybe just to wallow in my despond—I sat on the floor in a puddle of disappointment surrounded by an audience of cheerfully useless keys and facing a smug, impervious, and seemingly inviolable box, and that’s when it occurred to me. I can thank Maasterlich for the revelation, or any of those other teachers who drummed it into our heads. For that matter, I could thank myself, for don’t I drum it into the heads of my own students? One day you will make a misdiagnosis, I tell them, and it will be for the predictable reason: you were looking so hard for what you expected that you missed what was right in front of you.
Right in front of me, eye to keyhole, as it were, was the lock of the door in the back of the closet. I’d given the knob an inquisitive twist on first meeting, but I had never really inspected it, at least not sufficiently to appreciate its ornamentation, the tendrils covering the knob and the escutcheon with a rampant brass garden of vine. I felt around on the floor as my eye took this in, and the awareness struck, and my fingers came up with the original key, the one I’d removed from the nail, and I set it into the slot, and gave it a turn, and that’s how I came to be admitted into the palace, and so into Corie’s life.
PART TWO
VIII
COWARD, YOU LEFT before we could settle up. I’m thinking about our oldest and most idiotic argument, the thing I always told you I would hear no more about, about whether we would ever have children. Which meant: whether I should want them. I never wanted them, Daniel, as it turns out, and now I can tell you happily that I never will have them, so one of us is finally an authority on the thing we both used to rant about. You were correct on one point, and there was a price to pay, though it wasn’t the one you predicted, that everyone prattles on about. I haven’t mourned for that rejuvenating force of the future, the pitter-patter of little feet, the sky-blue gaze of tomorrow from the depths of the perambulator. You see, I haven’t betrayed the future with my lack of children. This is what you learn when you cross the mysterious bar and childlessness becomes part of your identity, this is what I want to tell you that you could never have known: I didn’t betray the future, but the past.
To whom will I pass on the stories I was given? Whom will I tell about you? I am the last carrier, a testifier without an audience. My family’s endless heritage ends with me; its meanings are my responsibility, mine alone, now. Sometimes the accumulation of decades—perhaps, sometimes, centuries—crashes against me like a storm surge hitting a seawall, but there is no release; beyond me there is nothing, no one to relieve the burden, assume my duty, hear my tale. More to the point: my parents’ tales. That is what children are, in the long run. You could make it definitional: your child is the person who carries your parents’ tale. It’s the job of your future to make sense of your past.
I hear your quibble: But Tilde, what centuries? You never had actual parents to give you a tale to pass on. Okay, Alice and Roy, adoptive ones—that’s love, but it’s hardly a lineage. Point taken. But point not taken, all the same, for Roy and Alice were parents to me, ample and sufficient, and their family and its sagas all I knew. Which is all the more reason why I think, today, as I sit here in Portbou, that I was never really orphaned until I was orphaned by my childlessness. I never produced an heir who could relate my history back to me.
That’s correct: Portbou. I got the heave-ho at the old place, Daniel, that dreary-day café where I began this saga, the place I wrote you from yesterday. It wasn’t a place I’d have entered if the rain wasn’t hounding me. Dingy, in a word. The lack of affection turned out to be mutual. You’d have been amused by it: bum’s rush, don’t oubliez your chapeau. Swept out of my rain refuge by the swish of a dishrag. I guess my residence in the banquette was threatening damage to the bottom line (not to mention the damage to my bottom) and so at any rate, now I must begin you a new letter from a friendlier clime. Passim will defend my squatter’s rights against all comers, at least today. It’s Saturday. The offices that supply his lunch clientele are closed, and, poor Passim, there just aren’t that many comers to defend against. Even the impervious waiter, whose name is Jeko and who extends his neglect more benignly these days (we share a bond. It turns out he visited Perth Amboy once, and he brings up New Jersey at the oddest times), won’t complain if I dawdle the hours away penning you a letter about forgotten disputes, all this childish childlessness stuff.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: The whole parade of generations is driven by the need to solve a mystery, a mystery we can never solve, and so we pass it on. The mystery is the meaning of individual moments in our lives, the lost step, the leaf’s twirl, the close of an eye, the sound the chair made when the chair was pushed back. Example: You and I standing on a sidewalk in the snow on an evening that we don’t yet realize is irreversible. Now, there’s a mystery I would ask to have answered. I would like to say: What does it mean that I was given a life, and that the life I was given turned around such an instant? May I submit the question? To whom do I address the envelope? Recipient Unborn?
For a while, I addressed it Recipient, Corie Bingham. Not because of her beauty and her youth—splendid decrepit beauty, tattered youth. I blame it on her eyes. They had a color, sometimes, when they looked into mine, that shone as dim as verdigris, like light in deep forest, but that usually were copper, a cheap trinket gold blushing through the brown, just as I’d seen them in the seconds of our first meeting, as I would see them on our second meeting, and upon our third, right here in Portbou. And they were empty, so terribly empty. But I am getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even told you about the palace I discovered at Saxe’s place when I turned the key and opened the closet door.
In truth, it wasn’t that easy.
I couldn’t even locate the keyhole until I’d chipped away an ancient piece of electrician’s tape that someone had pasted over it that had long ago hardened into shell. When I did finally get the key into the lock, it worked smoothly—the tumblers clicked, the bolt scraped open. That’s all. The key worked, but the door didn’t budge. Its edges were sealed with caulk and plaster and tape and paint, every sort of thin
g, and I went to work gouging all this out, stabbing away viciously with a table knife and a spatula. I also had to dismantle two clothing rods from their brackets. The visiting sunbeam abandoned the closet and left me swearing in the dark, but finally I could feel a little give in the door when I pulled on the knob and so I gave it a mighty tug, using all my weight, and then another, and with a third, the thing flew open so fast, with a great shower of dust and a racket of falling plaster, that I thought the whole wall had come away in my hand.
In my passion to get the door open (which I suspect was fueled by my pique at the stupid safe), I don’t think I even considered what might lie on its other side, had probably expected to find a bricked-up entry or a crawlspace or a utility corridor. I especially hadn’t stopped to imagine the consequence of an alarmed neighbor greeting my thundering demolitions and home invasion with the wobbly barrel of grand-père’s old bird gun hastily loaded with grand-père’s buckshot. But there was no wall and no neighbor, none of that. At first there was just silence and a blinding barrage of light, which landed on the floating cloud of plaster dust like judgment on Lot’s wife and re-calcified it into a solid, impenetrable curtain, a brilliance so tangible that I moved my hand to push it aside as I stepped through.
The room I stepped into past this curtain of dust was the antithesis of crawlspace. It was one of the most extraordinary I’d ever been in. In shape, first of all, for it was oval, and in size, though wall to wall, it was only maybe five times as big as my residence next door. Its true immensity was vertical. Above me, way, way above, was a violet sky, a tempera stratosphere dotted with puffy clouds and a few darting swifts and trimmed at the horizon in gold leaf. A crystal chandelier hung from a central mandala over an empty expanse of parquet.
My eye lingered on the spectacle of the chandelier—it must have held a hundred bulbs; it dangled from the sky like the gondola of a fabulous balloon—before taking in the room’s peripheries. There was no furniture. The back wall was painted, above the head-high wainscoting, with a bucolic landscape of trees and fields. On the opposite long wall, this pastoral was interrupted by tall windows, cataracts of glass, and the wall at the oval’s far end was pierced by French doors that opened into a second room.
I moved toward it, disregarding the fact that each step I took made me less and less the handywoman whose work on a door had accidentally breached a wall and who could explain away everything, really, to whoever showed up, and more and more the willful and egregious intruder. My hesitancy, my native good sense, was overpowered by a magnetic apparition. In the middle of the adjacent room, visible through the double doors, stood a piano. I approached it in a trance: a Bösendorfer prewar (that is, pre–Great War) Imperial, its mirror-lacquered top propped open, its gold frame glowing like a banked fire, a leather-upholstered bench shoved under it. Some musical scores were stacked loosely beside it on the floor; a Mozart sonata was open on its stand. I circumnavigated it in a marveling orbit, taking it in from all sides. So this was the mysterious conservatory whence were broadcast my nightly serenades! The room that housed the instrument was no less fine than the one before it, though the mural was supplanted by wine-hued satin wallpaper, the chandelier by several sconces with alabaster shades, and the copious ornamental filigree along the edges of the ceiling and descending the chamfered corners of the walls was silver leaf, not gold.
I would like to say that I paused at this point to yell hello or otherwise announce my presence, would like to claim that propriety, or at least timidity, constrained me from going farther, but I don’t remember any of that to be true. Somehow, the piano that had for so many nights so boldly invaded my space, irrespective of walls and borders, invited me now to return the favor. I padded softly—I had kicked off my shoes during my labors on the door and was barefoot—but without a qualm into the next room and the next and the next, surveying each of them slowly, each of them seeming to my astonished eye larger and more sumptuous than the last. They were successively easier to breach, too, as though their escalating grandeur allowed me to pretend I was touring some lavish public museum, not somebody’s home. In one room the parquet gave way to polished marble, icy under my feet, and another had a skylight and was entered through a colonnade of smooth, fluted columns. There was a hunt room that looked like it had been carved—floor, walls, ceiling, molding, and mantel—from a solid block of walnut (racked over the fireplace: several of grand-père’s long guns), and a library whose upper shelves were arrayed around a mezzanine balcony reached via a cast-iron corkscrew stair. All the rooms beyond the piano’s conservatory were darkened by heavy drapes drawn across tall windows, and all beyond the conservatory were furnished and appointed opulently: dense rugs rapturous underfoot, the tables topped with flower vases, in which, however, there were not any flowers.
There was nothing anywhere remotely alive, askew, or out of place, no open novel or tossed cap or gray ash in an ashtray that betrayed a human presence, except those musical scores. The scores, and a couple smaller indications, like a copper pot—alone, out of dozens hanging from hooks above a bank of ovens—set with a spoon, and an upturned porcelain bowl in a drying rack on a kitchen counter next to one of the sinks, and, in the pantry (a storeroom larger than Saxe’s quarters), which was otherwise barren of food, five cans of minestrone and half a jar of instant coffee. Then I reached the study.
The study—I call it such; it was dominated by a monumental mahogany partners’ desk—wasn’t what you’d call cozy, but it was at least more modest than the grand halls leading up to it. Within it was concentrated all the clutter and aroma of life that had been petrified out of its compatriots. What happy chaos! Clothes and books lay scattered about on nearly every horizontal surface, on chairs and couch and floor. Idly, I opened a couple of the volumes. They were textbooks. Like schoolbooks everywhere, they were each personally branded with a signature inside the front cover. The signature said Bingham. The desktop, oddly, was pristine, but a smaller writing table, set in front of an uncurtained window, was burdened with notepads and dictionaries. A straight-back chair was set before it; a lavender sweater was draped over the chair back. A small end table off to the side held an electric teapot, a crystal drinking glass bristling with pencils and ballpoint pens, a ceramic coffee cup, and an open box of tea bags, which explained the nice smell: orange pekoe, wafting into the air from the half-empty cup.
I froze. All the fear and trepidation I should have let gather with each successive room—nine rooms’ worth of fear (not counting the pantry)—took hold of me. I leaned to lay my fingers against the cup. A thin wraith of rising steam coiled around my head and I thought: Warm. The ceramic was smooth as glass and flushed as fever. I straightened with a start. Was that a sound? A step? I scurried on tiptoe around the desk and paused at the door, plastering my back against the wall like the spy I was or the burglar I’d be mistaken for.
Nothing.
I steeled my resolve for a dash back to my own place, praying that nobody had settled down in the rooms between me and my refuge, but something stopped me before I could bolt as surely as if a hand had grabbed my ankle. Beside me was a low book cabinet, a mess of envelopes splayed across its top: manila envelopes, some creased and dog-eared, some crisp and new, their flaps unsealed, all of them apparently empty and each hand-labeled M. Saxe—confidentiel.
The discovery disoriented me, a confusion that would settle into distress later when I had a chance to consider the implications but that now just hit like a slap. Whatever generous invitation the piano had extended was rescinded by those envelopes, by my collision with that name in this place. What could it mean? I sensed an ensnaring malevolence. I was in the presence of something more knowing than I was. I felt run to ground, surrounded by what I did not understand, a conspiracy of coincidence, and just as my extreme vulnerability and the emergency of needing to escape struck home, another noise came, and this time it was definite, a loud, mechanical ka-chunk.
I burst from the room. Without caution, without any r
estraint or plan or control, I shot through the shadow realm, crazily dodging furniture, mewing with terror, spinning through the whole long array of chambers until I reached the sunny conservatory—if the piano had not had its lid raised, I honestly think I might have tried to leap it—and the oval salon, and I jumped through my portal as though one step ahead of the hounds and slammed the door behind me and leaned against it.
I leaned against it for a long time, until my panting died down and my heartbeat settled and my reasoning self, my half century of hard-won composure, could begin to reassert sanity. No one heard you, my composed self said. You pounded away on that door for an hour and nobody came because nobody heard, and now you’re back where you started from, and safe. But you must erase your tracks.
I opened the door a crack: silence. I got the broom and dustpan and stepped back under that lovely, placid summer sky long enough to sweep up the worst of the evidence. The door, I observed, had no knob on the far side, and no escutcheon. It had been, from the palace point of view, just one more panel in the wainscoting until I’d erupted through it. Now it was not so invisible. My intrusion had pulled some paint away and splintered a piece of molding, which I tried to push back into place, without luck. I swept up plaster shards and paint chips and dust, and made it as good as I could get it. Then I retreated with my dustpan and broom and turned the vined key in the viney lock, except the lock wouldn’t work—I seemed to have sprung that too—but anyway the door stayed shut and I jammed Saxe’s shoe against it just to be sure and retired to the divan in exhaustion.
IX
[No place]
November 24
Carlos, my only,
I am so terribly afraid to write to you. My whole existence pines to hear your voice tell me you’ve received this. But I know I’ll have no word & no assurance—as soon as this letter leaves my hand my aloneness will be back & unbearable. But I must trust in luck, it is all that’s left for me. Valentín gone. Communication getting more dangerous (for you, dear!), & I know it will get worse. I’ll get you news as I can. Unhurt, a little sick recently, I guess to be expected. We’ve been warned to use an adresse intermédiaire, please note & watch for postmark Genève, and forgive if I sound not quite myself, it’s how it will have to be for a while. Are you safe, my love? I’m sure you heard how the Ebro fell. A horror, unnecessary. Retreat a despair—how exultant we were those first weeks! Internationals decamped, do we even exist anymore, for the world? Trying to reach Barcelona. Things may settle, though I fear [illegible—three lines] poor little one, [illegible] less lonely with him coming, but it isn’t so, only more aware of you. How could all this be happening in this way? Will write from B., maybe things stable there, we will see.
