Harvest

by Belva Plain

  “What are you going to do?” he asked softly.

  “What is there to do?” was the reply. “He must be somewhere with that man Powers. We think so, at least. Steve almost worshiped him. He was some sort of guru. But where do you look? The country is three thousand miles across. And he may not even be in the country at all.”

  Indeed. Paul’s thought went back and back. Martillini. Jordaine.

  “If I can help you,” he said. “I will do anything I can.”

  The offer was inept, vague, and halfhearted, as when some body says “Come visit us sometime” without saying definitely when. Yet it was the best he could do.

  “It seems,” Theo said, “that whenever you come, I have only troubles to tell you about. This has been a specially hard time for us.” He hesitated, his eyes searching Paul’s. “One thing after the other. All this so soon after Anna’s death.”

  Paul started as if he had been struck. “Anna died?”

  “Last summer. In her sleep. She hadn’t been ill at all. They just—we just found her in the morning.”

  What he was feeling Paul could not have described, because pain is after all indescribable. This was a wounding such as doctors call an “insult,” to the heart, or the lungs, or whatever. And out of these burst an accusation.

  “Why didn’t you let me know? You wrote about everything except the—” He was about to say “the most important thing”—and stopped.

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I kept putting it off. I suppose I wanted to spare you.”

  Paul did not answer.

  “It was an easy death, a good death.”

  “Yes.”

  There was no sound in the room except the creaking of Theo’s swivel chair. Presently, he spoke again.

  “It’s strange, Anna was always able to do more with Steve than anyone else could. I don’t know why. Some chemistry, perhaps, although that’s the same meaningless word we use to explain why people fall in love or don’t fall in love. Chemistry is either good or it’s bad. Meaningless.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think that Steve, even if we ever find him, will always be out of our reach. Iris, poor mother, can’t accept that.”

  The words drifted off into the stillness: Iris, poor mother.

  But Steve and Iris had fled away from Paul. Instead he was silently demanding of himself: What did you suppose? That she would go on living forever? Just always there, unreachable, untouchable, but always there? And he saw her vividly as he had seen her, standing in her yellow dress near the white snowball bush, with her arm raised to him in farewell.

  He roused himself and stood up, saying abruptly, “It’s late. I’d better leave. I’ll call you.”

  Theo stood too. “I’m sorry, Paul. I’ve upset you. Drive carefully. I’ll call you too.”

  He had almost reached the parkway when suddenly he swung the car around. For no sensible reason at all he wanted to see Anna’s house. It was not more than half a mile’s detour out of the way, but he would have gone long miles at that moment to see it again; he had seen it only once before, when he had been about to go to Italy. And he recalled his first shock of surprise that time, which had been immediately followed by a reaction: The house was quite suited to her, after all.

  He stopped the car now and looked. There were not many who in these days would choose to live in an old wooden house out of the last century, a sturdy pile wrapped about with a porch meant for evenings when a family sat on it, waiting for passersby to come down the road and enliven the quiet. A thick wisteria encased the pillars of the porch and fringed its roof. An elm, taller than the house, cast one side of the front yard into a deep, cool shade. She would have treasured that elm. It came to him that of the little he had really known of her, he was able to remember how she loved trees.

  And he sat on in the car, staring at the house. It was easy to plot its interior; the dining room to the left of the hall with the kitchen and pantry—a house like that had ample pantries—behind it; to the right, the double parlor, probably with sliding doors between them and a solarium in the rear. Above the porte cochere the large bay window would admit the sun to an ample room, the master bedroom very likely.

  The master bedroom was the heart of the house, because the heart of the marriage was in the bedroom, always. Always.

  “I want that,” he said aloud after a while, “late as it is, absurdly late, I want it. A solid, publicly acknowledged marriage. I never had it. What we had, poor Marian and I, was publicly acknowledged, God knows, but never a marriage in spite of that. What Anna had in that room up there—how can I know? It might have been secret torture or she might have made her peace with it, or it might have been something in between. Anyway, whatever it was, it wasn’t with me. And I want a try at the real thing even now, as old as I am.”

  He put the car into gear and drove home. Ilse was reading when he came in. The little dog lay at her feet, and a cup of coffee stood on the table beside the chair. The domestic scene was comforting. And he asked himself again: How many kinds of love can there be? The number may well be as large as the number of men and women in the world, added to the pattern that they make together, for the same man and two different women make two different patterns.

  He kept standing in the doorway looking at her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing new. Just that I love you, Ilse, and I think we should be married.”

  “Married? That’s new.”

  “No, it’s not. Have you forgotten I asked you before you decided to stay in Israel?”

  “Ah, yes, so you did!” At the corners of her jet-black eyes fine threadlike rays, called wrinkles, gave her face a touch of humor. “But why now? Isn’t everything good the way it is?”

  He came to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Not good enough. For far too long I’ve felt loose ends. Unfinished business. I want”—he sought the right words—“I want to tie things up, to make life orderly, as it’s supposed to be.”

  “Tie things up? Like a birthday present, nice glossy paper and a bow on top.”

  “If you like. But why not? It will be a real birthday present. We’ll go to the rabbi’s study with two witnesses, whomever you like.” His mind worked now in its best decisive rhythm. “Not Meg. She’s on the Coast, seeing Tom in the hospital. But Leah and Bill? I don’t really care who. Afterward we’ll have lunch or dinner at some festive place, just the two of us—”

  She interrupted merrily. “Not going to invite the two witnesses? How will that look, you proper gentleman?”

  “It will look terrible. You are absolutely right. So the four of us will have dinner. Then you and I will come back here and kick everybody out except Katie.”

  “And Lou?” Ilse was laughing.

  “Lou can stay too. Ilse, I want this!”

  She got up, put her arms around him, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Oh, my dearest, you shall have it. Anything you want, you shall have.”

  The witnesses were Bill and Leah, who were delighted with the whole thing.

  “About time,” Leah whispered in Paul’s ear.

  “No wedding presents, please,” directed Ilse. “I mean it. This apartment has enough china, silver and knickknacks, very beautiful ones, I’ll admit, to stock two shops.”

  “I mean it too,” Paul echoed.

  “I’ll take you at your word,” Leah agreed, “but you’ll have to let me provide the bridal outfit, or we won’t come. And that’s that.”

  So, on the appointed day, Ilse set out in the most beautiful suit, she swore, that had ever been imagined. Of palest blue silk, it was lined and trimmed in jade silk. In the V neck of the blouse hung the pendant.

  “That is a gorgeous piece!” said Leah, who knew by heart every jeweler from Tiffany to Van Cleef on Fifty-Seventh Street, down Fifth Avenue to Harry Winston and Carrier, along with others in between.

  “From Vienna via Israel,” was all Paul said.

  The ceremony in the r
abbi’s study was brief and, as always, very moving. After his blessing, the four went by taxi to lunch at the Tavern on the Green, Ilse’s choice, because it was “too beautiful a summer day to be shut up indoors.” Well into the afternoon they lingered over lobster and wine and a tiny wedding cake, ordered by Leah as a surprise.

  “We go back a long way, we four,” she said, regarding Paul and Ilse with affection and moist eyes, “and this is one of the best days we’ve ever had.”

  Ilse blew a kiss across the table. Then, in the glow of friendship, they all walked back through the park toward Fifth Avenue and home. Children were wheeling down the paths on roller skates, a long-haired youth was playing a guitar, and the day was mellow. Ilse kept stretching her hand out to look at the wedding ring. All of those things printed a picture in Paul’s mind, these and the rim of the sky where blue merged into soft green; he had never been happier.

  And he spoke it aloud: “I have never been happier.”

  21

  An idea came to Paul after he and Ilse had gone to visit Meg. Here, too, as in Theo’s office, the war had altered the very atmosphere. In burning grief Meg had wept over Tom’s disfigured face, and wept in a grief that mingled itself with shame and anger over Timothy.

  “I never thought,” she had kept saying, “how could I have thought, that a son of mine would be on the FBI wanted list? Oh, I am thankful my parents aren’t alive to know it!”

  “Always we go back to our parents,” Paul sighed on the way home. “It’s the thread of pride that holds the family together or undoes it.”

  Ilse reflected. “Tim’s a wild-eyed prophet, a hairy prophet out of the desert. From such people comes good or else destruction.”

  Paul let her talk, only half hearing her speculations. He himself had been in an introspective mood all that day, a mood that he liked to think was untypical of him, although Ilse said he was wrong about that, that it was only his up-bringing and habit that had trained him to keep his emotions hidden, even to himself. Anyway, this day he was peculiarly aware of sharpened senses, of voice tones, colors and nuances, of flavors and the texture of the linen napkin. It was as if he was trembling inside.

  But he said nothing more about it during the evening, and not until the next morning when, shortly after breakfast, he made his announcement. He had been thoughtfully watching Ilse comb her hair, observing the glint of light on the diamond wedding band as the hand moved back and forth and up and down. Then suddenly he said, “I’m going to try to find Iris’s boy.”

  The brush fell, striking the edge of the glass-topped dressing table.

  “Paul! What in heaven’s name do you mean?”

  Her tone, presaging as it did a stream of objections—and he knew they would be sensible ones—only tightened his determination.

  He answered positively, “Exactly what I said.”

  “Oh,” she cried, “do you know how crazy that is? I can give you ten dozen reasons why—”

  He raised a warning hand. “I know them all. It’s no business of mine. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And you’re right, it is crazy. But I’m going to try anyway.”

  Now Ilse changed to the coaxing tone one would use to a rebellious child.

  “You’re not a young man anymore. You can’t afford to go chasing off and exhausting yourself. I know the way you are when you get an idea—”

  “I’m not going skydiving, Ilse, nor on a twenty-mile run.”

  “You keep interrupting me! What I mean is, the kind of emotional commitment that you always bring to a cause can be just as damaging as running. Oh, Paul!” Now the tone changed again into exasperation. “Will you please tell me what half-baked idea you have now? Where are you going to look? Number One Main Street, USA?”

  “I have a few ideas. First I’m going to see Meg. I have a hunch she may have a hunch about Tim.”

  “Well, if she has, which I doubt, do you really think she’s going to give it to you? Would you, if he were your son?” Ilse paused to look Paul up and down, from the ruddy tips of his polished shoes to the topmost wave of his hair. “Well, yes, you’re different. You might well report your son to the authorities for the good of the nation. And for his own, you’d say. And I won’t argue with that, God knows. But really, will you please, please, really stay out of this affair?”

  He felt a wave of sadness. And suddenly wearied of the discussion, he brought it to a quiet end.

  “Ilse, darling, do you remember—of course you do—that rainy night in Jerusalem when you said to me, weeping, you said to me, ‘I have to stay. It’s not I who am making the decision, it’s making itself for me’? So now, this is the same for me. I must do it, Ilse. I can’t even tell you why because I don’t altogether know. I only know that I must.”

  After an hour’s visit with Meg and her husband, Paul saw clearly that there was little or nothing to be advanced there. And yet, when he left them, he was not quite sure whether some seed had possibly been planted after all.

  “I suppose,” he asked bluntly, “there’s nothing new about Tim?”

  “If there were, wouldn’t I tell you?” Meg responded.

  Paul said only, “I hope you would.”

  “What is it you want of me?” she asked.

  “Briefly, this,” he answered. “There’s a young man, a son of dear friends who are distraught because he’s been missing. He was a student of Tim’s. He venerated Tim. I want to find the young man without”—here he raised his voice and spoke somewhat sternly—“without harming Tim. I thought maybe you could … well, I’m not sure exactly what I thought you could do. It’s only that I want so much to find the young man.”

  “I see. We none of us know anything, Paul. We, too, are distraught. Even Tom, in the army hospital, even he, a law-and-order man if ever there was one, and poles apart from his brother, is sick over this. And Agnes, who loved him so—you may remember how close those two were, Tim and Agnes, almost from the time they were babies?” Meg choked and stopped.

  No, Paul decided, she knows nothing. As Ilse had said, there would be nothing to get from Meg.

  But as he drove back to the city, these words kept repeating themselves: how close they were, those two.

  He hadn’t seen Agnes in years, and probably wouldn’t see her in more years, unless someone’s marriage or funeral should bring her here from the mountains of New Mexico.

  And steering the car through traffic, through the Lincoln Tunnel back into Manhattan, a thought kept growing and growing larger. A wild goose chase. He could hear Ilse say it already. Just like the swan chase on Lake Garda. So he had found who Jordaine was, and what difference had it made? It had been merely another fact to join a thousand other useless facts in his head.

  And still … and yet …

  Well, let them all think he was a fool going on a fool’s errand! Surely it was on their faces. It was in Theo’s polite surprise when he asked for some photos of Steve with and without a beard, in Theo’s guarded questions and cautions about Paul’s health. My mental health, Paul thought ironically. He must think I’m senile or else have always been some sort of rich eccentric, like the ones you read of now and then who go about sprinkling money to the crowds as if it were confetti.

  “May I ask what your thoughts are, how you’re going to begin?” inquired Theo.

  “You may ask, but I can’t tell you,” said Paul.

  “I understand,” said Theo, still very mildly and tactfully, as if to say “Heaven help us, he means well, poor man; he’s trying to do this for his daughter. Yes, yes, one has to pity him.”

  They parted, with the photos in Paul’s wallet.

  “How long will you be gone?” asked Ilse.

  “If I can’t accomplish anything in a month, I’ll come home.”

  “For God’s sake, take care of yourself. Don’t knock yourself out,” she pleaded. And then with the humor that was so typical of her she admonished, “I’ve only just become a bride; don’t make me a widow right away, please, will you
?”

  “Not to worry. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

  His plane, heading westward, crossed the Mississippi, the iron-gray river whipping and curving its way toward the Gulf; then it crossed Missouri, where the fields lay mottled green and brown like a tortoise’s back; next it turned southward where the earth was red, the warm color of bricks. As it began descent, the mesas loomed stark and solitary over the expanse of the empty land. And the very loneliness of this land made another change in his vacillating moods.

  “It will come to nothing.” Common sense spoke out as if to armor him against inevitable failure. “It will come to nothing,” he murmured aloud so that the man in the seat beside him turned with a startled look.

  Nevertheless, when the plane touched the earth in Albuquerque, his adrenaline began to pour again. Excitement mounted as his plan unfolded: Rent a car, drive to Santa Fe, arriving at nightfall, and leave for Taos in the morning. There he would make the rounds of the art galleries. Surely some fellow artist would know Agnes Powers and where she lived.

  He himself knew only that it was somewhere in the mountains beyond Taos. Something, he did not know what, had told him not to ask Meg for the address. Simply, he had had an instinctive feeling that it would be best to give no warning of his coming. Apparently, she had no telephone, which was not unexpected if you knew her, he remarked to himself, when in the hotel at Santa Fe he had tried and gotten nowhere with the telephone company.

  But somehow he would find her. Perhaps if I hadn’t inherited a banking business, he thought, laughing to himself, I might have made my way as a private investigator.

  It was early when he left Santa Fe. Pueblo Indian women in front of the ancient Governor’s Palace were just spreading their bright blankets on the walk and arranging their turquoise and silver wares. The air was pure and energizing, the sky was the deepest blue he had ever seen, and on his right as he drove northward, wherever clouds hovered on their peaks, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains blazed white.