by Sarah Blake
He listened to her voice describe the Big House, the small rooms, the wall above the stairs where light moved across it slow and calm. She was reverent, like one entranced.
“There’s nothing to do up there but be.”
“Be what?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Us,” she said after a while, and turned her gaze on him. “The Miltons.”
He considered this.
“It’s the one place on earth where I feel right.” She was soft.
“Right?”
“No, that’s not true.” She lifted onto her elbow and touched his face. “Here, in this bed I am right. Also.”
“Then I won’t leave this bed until you come back.”
She bit her lip. He looked at her. They hadn’t spoken about this yet. The after. After Maine. After summer. The fall.
“You’ll lie here, in wait?”
He nodded, a slow smile spreading.
“I am the troll who will carry the princess off at last.”
“A six-foot-two troll?” She laughed. “What if the princess doesn’t want to go?”
“I’m a convincing troll.”
Twenty-three
KITTY RODE THE ELEVATOR up, the cut roses from the garden in Oyster Bay heavy in her arms. She stood stiffly in the car, alone with her reflection in the polished brass. She missed having an elevator man, the easy silence, the sense of weight and purpose as he spun the wheel, the grating of the cage door as he pulled it open and shut. Everything nowadays was so silent and swift.
The elevator opened onto a tiny hall wallpapered in a pale yellow silk, a Beau Brummell flanked by two slipper chairs. The bowl of pale pink hydrangeas in the table well was looking a little tired, she noted as she pushed open the door into their apartment.
Where it was quiet. She stood in the center hall, the doors to the four directions of the apartment open, and listened. Nothing came from the empty living room before her. Behind her the hall to the butler’s pantry and the cool kitchen, where Jessie must be, though there wasn’t a sound. To her right the door down to their bedroom. To her left, through the door to the library, she could just see the thick and rounded arm of the leather sofa. A blaze of sun lazed across the deep dark green, like the unexpected light one stumbled on in the middle of the woods on Crockett’s. The lamp was on and voices started up again. Someone was in there with Ogden. She slipped out of her coat and reached for a hanger in the coat closet, trying to hear who it might be. The linen hung down, and she tucked it in beside Ogden’s coat, and the voice stumbled—Dunc’s. It was Dunc. She listened. It almost sounded as if they were arguing.
The two men looked up as she pushed through the door and stopped talking, as if she’d pulled a cord and a curtain fell.
“Hello, darling.”
The room tensed around something she couldn’t grip.
“What’s the secret?” she asked lightly.
“No secret,” said Ogden, the expression on his face unreadable. He held a letter in his hand.
“Hello.” Dunc stood and enfolded her in a hug, the ghost of his old crooked grin snaking across his face, which both comforted and dismayed. He really was, she realized, quite terribly thin, the dear laughing man he’d once been now overtaken by this gray specter, as though he had slipped free of his own shadow, and what was left to stand for him was something airy and unsettled.
She remained in the doorway, a little less certainly now, her dress a long cool spot of blue against the dark molding.
“Can I get either of you a drink?”
“Terrific.” Ogden smiled at her, but as if from a great distance.
“Usual?”
“For me.” He nodded. “Dunc?”
“Bourbon,” her cousin answered. “Thanks, Kitty.”
In the living room the ice bucket had been brought and filled and the glass tumblers set out.
Ogden murmured something she couldn’t hear, and Dunc’s voice raised in answer: “I was. I was—we were—in charge of them. Nine hundred sixty-one of them—”
The St. Louis, she realized. That again. Kitty dropped three cubes in each glass and reached for the bourbon. The liquor slid golden over the ice and splashed round.
Dunc had been so lovely, the perfect expression of all of them—courteous, good-looking, strong. He was the one on whom hope rested. Frailty, Kitty thought, considering her cousin, had never occurred to her. She did not know what to do with him now. He was embarrassing, and she was ashamed of feeling embarrassed by his drinking, his provoking. Bringing up the war and what we had or hadn’t done.
Kitty tipped a little more into Dunc’s glass than hers or Ogden’s and carried them back across the front hall on a tray, into the library.
“You shouldn’t dwell on it,” Ogden was saying, impatiently. “You tried to help.”
“Help?” Dunc nodded at the letter in Ogden’s hand. “As you helped?”
Ogden’s face hardened.
“Why can’t we just admit what we did?” Dunc frowned, taking his glass from Kitty. She set the tray down on the desk in front of Ogden and carried her glass to the sofa, where she sat.
“What did we do?” Ogden was being patient, she saw.
“We—the State Department—sent those people back. And you—”
“It’s not so clear.”
“It is. It’s very clear. And we did it.”
Ogden shook his head. “You did your level best. There were others—”
“Enough,” Dunc cried sharply. “Enough,” he repeated. He sounded exhausted.
“Ogden.” Kitty remonstrated. “Dunc. What on earth is going on?”
Dunc swirled the liquid in his glass. Ogden looked at her.
“Do you remember the day we first saw the Island? There was a German woman, an old friend.”
Kitty swallowed.
“Elsa Hoffman and her son,” Ogden continued. “Do you remember? Who was staying at the Lowells’ that weekend?”
Kitty nodded slowly. “Willy.”
“Yes.”
Kitty waited.
Ogden put the letter down on his desk. “She was hanged. In 1942. In Plötzensee prison. The Germans have just released the records.”
The anguish on his face was clear.
“Oh, Og—”
“We were fairly certain she was dead. But we didn’t know how—”
“Or where,” Dunc finished.
Kitty sat forward.
“Because she was a Jew?”
Ogden shook his head. “Because she was a hero.”
Kitty stared at him.
“She and her husband,” he continued. “And others. She stole papers from her father’s factory that proved what Hitler was planning—”
“And passed them off to the Russians.” Dunc swallowed the last of his whiskey, his eyes on Ogden. “Though she had asked for our help.”
“Your help?” Kitty looked at Ogden.
Ogden nodded, smoothing the letter on the desk before him. “I didn’t agree with her—then.”
“I had thought you didn’t like her,” Kitty said.
“Didn’t like her?” Ogden looked at her and frowned. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
I saw your face, she wanted to say. I saw your back stiffen. I heard your voice. You needed me to be firm that day. You needed me to help. It was so clear to me there, long ago. You did not want to be part of that woman’s plan. You did not want to be pushed.
“And what happened to the boy?” she managed. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.” Ogden was thoughtful. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. So many children were lost.”
“We should have offered to keep him when we could,” Dunc said.
Ogden shook his head. “She’d never have asked.”
Elsa’s urgent face on the porch that night at the Lowells’ arrived whole and unopened, rising above the surface of the years and waving, like a hand shot out of the sea. The pitch, the timbre of her comprehending oh! reverberated dee
p in Kitty in that moment, like the shiver of a bell struck silent upon its rope.
Kitty set her glass carefully on the side table.
“I must change for the Wilmerdings’ dinner,” she said, and rose from the couch.
Twenty-four
LIKE A BELL AT the races, the first of August came, and much of Wall Street went north. Milton Higginson was reduced to its skeleton crew. Len wandered the halls of the emptied office, coming in every morning to sit at his desk and nudge along the accounts he’d been given, placing phone calls he knew would not be returned until after Labor Day, happy to be the lone man on the watch. In the motionless hours after lunch, with the windows shoved high, he continued to page through the company holdings, determined to come up with the list of good candidates for the idea he had pitched Mr. Milton by the time the partners returned.
Late one afternoon toward the middle of the month, Len pulled open one of the last of the drawers in the file room. The single file inside gave thick testimony to the fact that the firm must have had a long history with this particular company, and Len brought it back upstairs to his desk and opened it, looking for Ogden’s notes. The Walser Gruppe was evidently a German steel manufacturer Ogden had courted throughout the twenties, culminating in his first investment in 1929. There was a certificate of agreement signed June 19 of that year. And then several pages detailing the inventory—mostly hairpins and kitchen faucets. Len turned the pages quickly, noting the clear evidence of a good investment—the company’s numbers grew and grew over the next five years, expanding into 1935 when Len arrived at a second letter of agreement, signed in June of that year by Ogden and by Walser. Beside Walser’s signature was the Nazi seal.
Len shoved the paper back as if he’d been burned and stared down.
Then, carefully, methodically, he went through every piece of paper in the file. But there was no third letter dissolving the agreement. There was nothing at all. Nothing to suggest anything other than what these letters laid out. Milton Higginson had stayed in all through the war. Could be, in fact, still invested. Len stood up from the desk and found himself, not thinking, walking toward the men’s room at the back of the office, where he turned on the tap, cupped his hands, and filled them with cold water. He drank and then filled his hands and drank again, then filled them a third time, which he simply poured over his head.
Joan. Her name rose in his throat like a sob.
He looked up, dripping wet, and stared in the mirror. It was then that Len wondered if Ogden Milton had meant for him to find those pages all along.
He turned and went back to his desk, not thinking, his hands simply moving through the papers, replacing all the files back in the box. All except the Walser file. Carefully, he arranged all the pages in this one neatly back in order. Save for the two letters of agreement.
He looked at them again. And slid them into his briefcase, closed the lid, and snapped it shut. Then he walked out into the hot city, unseeing, nearly running as he headed for home.
“Reg,” he called into the apartment. The rooms were still, the windows open to the heat. Len walked in, put the briefcase on the table, walked to the window, and turned around. “Reg?” he tried again.
His eyes fell on the row of Polaroids stretched in the line above the sofa. Arranged like that, it was inescapable—all the faces looking back from the frames wanted the man behind the camera gone.
Len studied them for a long while and then turned from the wall and made his way into the kitchen. The light of the icebox opened in the dark room like a fire in the woods. He pulled out a beer and went back to sit underneath Reg’s photographs and wondered where he was.
* * *
THE FIVE SPOT was hot, dark, and packed that night, and Reg and Moss had found themselves a small table, two in from the edge of the bandstand. A quartet called the Ball Points was taking the stage slowly, and for now just the piano wove through the chatter in the room. The two men had fallen into the habit of sitting together in bars, comfortably silent, content to observe. Collecting, it occurred to Reg one night. There was an unspoken sense between them that this was a time in between, this summer they were treading water. Moss had shifted his chair so he sat with his back to the drum kit and faced into the room, watching it all and playing the table, tense, abstracted, and distant in a way Reg hadn’t seen.
He was due to leave at the end of the week to follow his family up to Maine. And then, Moss thought, his eyes sliding across three men sitting at a table. All of their feet were tapping the floor. He watched. In opposite rhythm. He shook his head, smiling in spite of his sinking heart.
What did he want? The question at the back of his mind rolled forward as if tipped into the light. Rolled around and then as suddenly rolled back and away again in the dark. The maid’s hands pulling down his white shirt firmly, tucking it into his waistband, yanking him slightly forward. Tucked in, tucked up, turned out, and emerging into the living room and the quick appraising glance of his mother as he appeared. Here is Moss, she’d say, smiling to the people sitting, having drinks in the deep-carpeted room. Our eldest.
He glanced at Reg, who was sitting very still, smoking, his head cocked to one side. Moss wanted to spend the month in hot cellar after smoky bar, following music, sitting and listening with Reg. Not on the Island. Not up there, the most beautiful place on earth. Where the Milton grip was so tight, he couldn’t breathe.
“Do you know Lorraine Hansberry?” he asked quietly, his eyes on a couple at a distant table.
“Because I’m a Negro from Chicago?”
“Noooo. No,” Moss turned to Reg, patient. “No, I mean have you seen A Raisin in the Sun?”
“Have you?”
Moss nodded.
“And?”
“It was the first time I’d ever seen my own story on the stage.”
“Your story?”
Moss nodded, his eyes on his friend. “To see something, to want it that bad. To want and want and know that it’s impossible—it’s impossible. What you want is just under the surface, just under the skin. But not yet arrived. And still you want.”
Reg looked at him. “What are you talking about?” He was impatient. “You can have anything you want.”
“No, Reg.” Moss squared his gaze, steady. “I can’t.”
Reg stared back at him.
Sudden as a shot, the drums took off, and both men jumped, released, as Philly Joe Jones on the drums took them into the song, his arms working his sticks, striking the beat like matches into light, into life, lifting the room right off its bricks; and then enormous Jim Mollow with his trumpet stepped into his sound, slowly, like a girl too shy at first to come to the party, like a girl considering, while the drums banged and banged loud, so goddamned loud, Moss shouted out and turned and looked at Reg, who nodded once, and then the trumpet spun a long note, spun its gold thread above their heads, and cast Reg back to the spot in the alley where he used to meet Len to walk to school, and then further back to his father and his mother dressed in fur, his mother leaning out the window of their big black Buick, her long arms shot free of the fur, and his father, one leg up on the dashboard, both of them looking at him as he came toward them for the ride over to the lake. He saw his father’s shoulders and his mother’s hat, and they drove and the windows were down. It was spring, the air smelled a little rotten from the alewives washed up on shore, and they drove, and when they came to Lake Shore, his father slowed the car, pulled to the side, and then stopped, the motor running.
In the distance, to the left, Chicago glinted in the sun, and the cars along the lake darted and dipped, humming along. He heard the distant whine of the El. They sat in the car, his parents looking out the windshield. Reg reached down to pull on the handle and open the door.
“No, son,” said his father.
Reg looked up.
“You stay sitting.” His mother turned around.
Reg sat back against the leather. The three of them sat in the car and didn’t speak. The
re was the city. The bright waters of Lake Michigan shivered.
After a while, his father reached down and released the brake, then turned the car around and drove back to their house. Oh Mother, the drums dropped down. Oh Father, the trumpet soared. It was life in the dark playing away up there. It was Reg’s life playing down. You can wear your furs, you can go to church, you can own your house, you can pray. Lord, you can pray. And you can drive so far, and then you must turn around. This far and no farther. Life and sorrow and that beat. That beat that promised anything—anything at all might come.
Moss had sprung up on his feet with most of the room, clapping and calling out. But Reg felt he was going to cry. Like any boy, sitting in the dark, hit by memory, he was going to cry. He put his head in his hands and let the music hold him.
Mollow played the last note, played it out across the heads and the faces lifted to him, played it out the door and onto the street. He played. And when he stopped the room was quiet. Utterly still. The song hovered in their heads.
And then Philly Joe stood and mopped the top of his drum set and mopped his neck. And one by one the four musicians stepped down off the bandstand and went to the bar for a drink. Just men again.
“Christ!” Moss sat down. “That’s what I want to get. Did you hear that? That moment way up there at the top of the tune. Man—”
Reg stared into his drink, exhausted by the music.
“That’s what I want to make people feel,” Moss said. “If I could do something like that, take all this fire and push, push hard on the doors, push it like Mollow did tonight—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Moss looked up as if seeing him for the first time and, not hearing the edge in Reg’s voice, went right on.
“Mollow blows his horn—and it’s his, it’s all his, his story, his memories he’s wound up tight in every note. But I can hear it,” Moss said. “I hear it, too. It doesn’t matter that he’s black and I’m white. I hear it. And that proves it.”
