The Final Judgment

by Richard North Patterson

  Watching him, Caroline realized that the thought of having Nicole to herself, away from here, felt like desertion and yet came as a relief. And that her father knew all this.

  They left one day after Caroline finished school.

  They stopped in Boston, bought some summer dresses, had cocktails and dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. The next day, eyes alight, Nicole presented Caroline with a gold bracelet and her first set of expensive earrings. “We’ve become so provincial,” Nicole said lightly, “that we’re both at risk of becoming like the heroines of an English Gothic novel, so earnest and unadorned that no one will read our pages. A tragedy for us and the world alike.” By the time they got to Martha’s Vineyard, the trip had begun to seem like an escapade, a high-spirited rebellion against a dreariness that only her mother felt.

  But Caroline was happy to sustain the mood. One afternoon, they played tennis at the Edgartown Yacht Club and then had dinner at that bastion of Republicanism and plaid pants; after much laughter and perhaps too much champagne, Nicole had wondered aloud why Barry Goldwater had so much compassion for Southern blacks that he would not burden them with the difficulty of voting. If a few heads had turned, Nicole did not care. “These people,” she murmured on leaving, “will forever wonder why everyone can’t be more like them, while I will forever wonder why they wear such foolish clothes.”

  But beneath this, her mother’s feelings were more serious. The island was alive with civil rights ferment—church services, rallies, speeches by young summer residents now working in the South. The next Sunday, a somber Nicole took Caroline to a memorial service for Medgar Evers, the murdered civil rights leader. Though her mother had said nothing, Caroline could not help but wonder whether she was thinking of her own family. When she touched her mother’s hand, Nicole squeezed Caroline’s fingertips.

  Yet much of their time was light, almost airy. When they went to the movies, Nicole chose a Taylor-Burton romance over The Longest Day, just as she chose a Beatles album for the record collection. When they played croquet on the lawn above Nantucket Sound, Nicole poured another glass of wine and began changing the rules: their contest became so antic, the antithesis of Channing’s geometric game, that Nicole and Caroline forfeited competition to laughter and shared the rest of the wine. But Nicole followed the presidential race with an intensity that brooked no humor: the night the Republican convention shouted down Nelson Rockefeller, she shook her head and murmured, “Frightening. And to think that last year there was Kennedy.” Then, a short time later, she said, “Now Americans will have their own racist war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Vietnam. So murderous and yet so provincial—to learn nothing from the one thing the French truly have to teach: ethnocentrism.”

  To Caroline, it was like discovering a stranger, mordant and despairing, who lived below the shifting surface of her mother’s moods. Caroline found this sudden window on her mother’s soul both exciting and disturbing, as if discerning the distance that Nicole had moved from them, her family, beneath the cover of her silence. Not once in their first days together did Nicole refer to her husband.

  It was this realization that most unsettled Caroline. But it did not truly strike her until the night the telephone rang and, as Nicole answered it, Caroline knew that the call was not from Channing Masters.

  Perhaps it was a rise in her mother’s voice, the slightest change in her slender body, now catlike in its stillness. “Who was that?” Caroline asked.

  They sat on the screened porch as sunset spread across the water. Nicole put down her wineglass; the veiled, considering look she gave Caroline seemed imported from New Hampshire, so different was it from their last few days. “Oh,” she said casually, “a friend—you remember Paul Nerheim. He hopes to see us sometime.”

  “All of us?” Caroline asked.

  A second’s pause, her mother’s look keen, then vanishing with a wave of her hand. “I suppose it depends on the time.” Her voice became dry. “But I will give you plenty of notice.”

  So she knows how I feel, Caroline thought. She was not sure that this was a comfort.

  Caroline had disliked Paul Nerheim’s smile before she sensed her father’s feelings.

  There was something about it that Caroline did not care for—perhaps, she thought now, the way it seemed to linger on her mother.

  “You’re very tall,” he had said to Caroline. “Like a dancer or an athlete.”

  It had been the summer before, when Caroline was thirteen. She was not yet used to being taller than Nicole; her breasts had not filled out, and she was afraid of looking too much like her father. Knowing this, her mother had answered, “More like the runway model I could never become,” sparing Caroline the necessity of saying anything. As if in sympathy for Caroline, Channing Masters did not smile.

  Their family—Channing, Nicole, and Caroline—stood in the entryway of Nerheim’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. Caroline felt their presence as the kind of arbitrary social act peculiar to adults: for some reason, Nerheim had asked them here; someone—her mother, Caroline assumed—had accepted; and Caroline could not understand why anyone had bothered. In a vague way she knew that Nerheim was an investment banker from New York; that he had met her parents on the night when Nicole had inveigled a reluctant Channing into a summer dance in Edgartown; and that Nerheim was an acquaintance of John F. Kennedy. But what she sensed most keenly was that this man would never be her father’s friend.

  They even looked different: Nerheim with his even tan, white tennis sweater, gold-coin watch; Channing with his slacks, plain shirt, comfortable hiking shoes. Even Nerheim’s thin face, mobile eyes, and lively gestures seemed the opposite of Channing’s quiet dignity, his air of watchful judgment. Nicole stood smiling between them, lightly touching Nerheim’s arm.

  “You were so kind to ask us, Paul. And your ‘country place,’ as you put it, is lovely.”

  And it was, in a way. They had taken a twisting dirt road through the woods of Chilmark, close to the unseen bluffs of the Atlantic, which opened unexpectedly to an acre of green manicured lawn, fronting a mansion so eccentric that Caroline found it startling. It was a sprawling, almost gingerbread structure with chimneys, windows, and dormers everywhere, and a glassed-in porch with panes shaped like waves, so that they seemed to flow and ripple across the porch. Nicole contrived to be enchanted.

  “This is wonderful,” she said. “So many people live as if they’re communing with their ancestors.”

  Caroline glanced at her father, who was studying Nicole with a faint half smile. “This would drive my ancestors crazy,” Nerheim said, and gave Nicole a smile of complicity that seemed to exclude Channing. “If I even knew who they were. Come, I’ll show you the attic.”

  Trailing after them, Caroline fell in next to her father.

  The attic was made of polished teak, shaped like the prow of a ship. In spite of herself, Caroline was impressed.

  “The original owner hired a shipbuilder and then ran out of money,” Nerheim explained. “It wasn’t finished for years, until I did the rest last summer. A masterpiece of the shipbuilder’s art.”

  “Does it float?” Channing inquired mildly.

  Nerheim gave a short laugh. “Perhaps we’ll see,” he said. “During the next hurricane—”

  “But where’s the ballroom?” Nicole interjected. “You, Paul, who seem to like dancing so much.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I’ll pour some champagne and show you.”

  Glasses in hand, her parents followed Nerheim across the grass to a carefully laid stone path that meandered artfully through the woods. At its end, a clearing suddenly opened to a clay tennis court.

  They stopped by the net. Surrounded by woods, they could not be seen or heard from the house. Nerheim gave a mock bow.

  “The ballroom?” Nicole asked.

  Nerheim smiled. “Of course.”

  At a dinner served by two silent servants, Nerheim turned the table talk to the opera se
ason in New York, the symphony, the jazz clubs he knew here or there. Nicole listened appreciatively; her questions sent him on knowing tangents, which, Caroline saw, seemed of interest only to her mother. What inquiries Nerheim addressed to her father seemed so studiedly polite that they underscored Channing’s inability to speak to what seemed to engage his wife. To Caroline, Nerheim said almost nothing.

  “Can I go for a walk?” she asked before dessert. “I’d like to see the ocean from here.”

  “Of course,” her father answered, excusing her from Nerheim’s table without glancing at their host.

  Outside, in the cool of early evening, Caroline breathed deeply.

  The sun was falling behind the trees. Caroline walked the darkening path through the woods until she reached a fork; she stopped, confused for a moment, and then chose the path which she guessed must lead to water. But the woods were thick and gnarled; it was not until she climbed a steep rise, toward a sudden swatch of evening sky, that she found herself on a sheer cliff above the blue endless sweep of the Atlantic.

  The surprise of it caught her in a moment of vertigo, left her pulse racing. Two hundred feet below her was a sandy beach; the orange sandstone cliff, scarred by wind and rain, was so precipitous that it seemed to drop beneath her feet. Down the face of the cliff, stairs crisscrossed to the bottom; beside them were strewn the skeletal remains of other stairs, destroyed by storms.

  Caroline sat, gazing across the water.

  It was strange. She had always viewed the ocean with a respect close to awe, but never with fear. Yet beneath the gray-blue surface of the water she felt the savage roiling of a storm she could not see, save on the ruined cliffside. It was some time before she rose, a little unsteady, and backed away.

  When she returned, the adults were in the living room, still chatting about opera. Her father glanced up from his chair. “Tired?” he asked pleasantly.

  To her surprise, Nerheim summoned a look of deep courtesy for Channing, a smile for Caroline that was close to rueful. “She should at least be bored,” he said. “I’ve been so alone lately that I ramble on about whatever interests me, without a care for my guests. My apologies, Caroline.”

  Caroline did not know what to say. But her mother’s expression changed, as if this last remark had engaged her more than what had gone before. “What may seem boredom,” she said gently, “is, in Caroline, self-sufficiency. As for us, there is very little opera in Resolve. You are kind to remind us of the larger world.”

  As he turned to Nicole, Nerheim’s smile became warm; perhaps it was only to Caroline that his humility seemed too self-assured. “Thank you, Nicole. I’m sure Resolve has other charms. Next time—and I hope there will be—I’ll leave room for you to tell me of them.”

  Nicole’s returning smile was oblique and ambiguous—to Caroline, it could have meant anything, from Of course, all of us know that we’ll never do this again to Please give me a few days to consider what Resolve’s charms are. As Channing put down his coffee, contemplating his wife, Caroline sensed an unspoken humiliation.

  “I am kind of tired,” she said to her mother. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course,” Nerheim said with a tolerant smile, and rose from the table.

  At the door, Nerheim clasped her father’s shoulder, one friendly man to another. Knowing that her father disliked being touched by strangers, Caroline winced; Channing’s expression did not change. “Channing,” Nerheim said, “thank you so much for lending me your family. As I said, I’ve spent too much time alone.”

  As Channing extended his hand, the gesture put distance between them. “Thank you,” he said with civility. “It was good of you to have us.”

  The corners of Nerheim’s eyes crinkled, and then he turned to Nicole, clasping her hand in both of his. “Nicole,” he said. “I hope I see you again. All of you.”

  Her mother tilted her head; what this suggested to Caroline was that, were it not for Channing, she would have proffered her cheek. “Oh, you will, Paul.” She gave a wry look at their surroundings. “Solitude in such a place must be a trial for you.”

  Nerheim laughed. “Oh, it is,” he said, and released her hand.

  The ride home was quiet. Leaving, Channing stopped at the fork in the road, beam lights catching a gnarled tree. “To the left,” Nicole said softly. Otherwise, she was silent.

  Later, Caroline went to the kitchen for orange juice, heard raised voices from her parents’ bedroom. The last voice was her father’s.

  Despite herself, Caroline crept to the bedroom door.

  “The man is cheap and insinuating,” she heard her father say. “And you played to him.”

  “The man is polite, Channing. As was I. For both of us.”

  “You’re my wife.” The thick anger in her father’s voice was something Caroline had never heard. “You needn’t compensate for me. I’m sure that there are other women who can give Paul Nerheim the admiration he so clearly needs.”

  There was silence. When her mother spoke again, her tone was so quiet and weary that Caroline barely heard. “Admiration,” she said softly, “is all that’s left to me.”

  In the darkened hallway, Caroline felt herself flush with the shame of listening. She turned away.

  The next day, they left the island, four days earlier than planned. Now, a year later, the memory fell like a shadow between Caroline and Nicole.

  “I don’t feel like seeing him,” Caroline said to her mother.

  Nicole finished her wine. “You don’t have to,” she answered in a careless voice. “I’m not sure that I do, either.”

  Two

  As the days passed, Nicole Masters seemed restless.

  She took less interest in their tennis, did not come up with new excursions, retreated into books. She encouraged Caroline to contact the daughters of other summer people, friends from past years. Yet for two nights running, Nicole walked the beach alone; Caroline watched her, hands in the pockets of her white cardigan sweater, gazing out to sea. Caroline felt a loss.

  When her mother returned from the beach on the second night, Caroline was waiting. With new directness, she asked, “Are you all right, Mother?”

  Nicole looked startled, as if awakened from her thoughts. “Have I not been?”

  Caroline hesitated, afraid to articulate her instincts. “I don’t know….”

  Nicole gave her a faint smile. Gently, she said, “It’s not you, Caroline. If that’s what you’re sensing.”

  Caroline felt relief, the tenuous renewal of their bond. “What is it, then?”

  Her mother shrugged. “Does ‘it’ have to be anything? Other than me?” Her voice was dispassionate but not unkind. “I have my moods, that’s all. Perhaps you notice them more without your father to distract you. If so, I apologize.”

  It was less apology than statement of fact; it was as if Nicole had accepted her own apartness, and thus that others should. But Caroline did not wish to.

  “I’ve been thinking—tomorrow, let’s go for a day sail.” Caroline’s voice quickened, as if to impart excitement to her mother. “We’ll sail over to Tarpaulin Cove, where Father took me last year—have a picnic on the beach and go swimming. Really, it would be fun for you.”

  Nicole’s smile did not quite hide a sadness in her eyes. “Would it?”

  “Sure,” Caroline answered. “I’ll make the sandwiches and sail the catboat myself. All you have to do is go with me.”

  Nicole considered her, still smiling a little. “All right, then. You make it hard to argue.”

  Before Nicole could change her mind, Caroline went to the kitchen and began preparing for their picnic. When the telephone rang, her mother answered it in another room.

  Caroline emerged from the kitchen. “The picnic’s ready,” she said. “Was that Father?”

  Nicole seemed to study her. “Your father would have asked for you. But you may call him if you wish.”

  The tacit rebuke silenced Caroline. She found that she did not want to
speak with Channing.

  But when morning came, Nicole did not wish to sail.

  “I’m sorry, Caroline.” Her voice was soft. “I find that I don’t feel well.”

  In her mother’s eyes, Caroline saw a silent plea for understanding—of what, she did not know. But Nicole said nothing more.

  Caroline’s anger burst out unbidden. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “I’m not going to mope around the house all day or hang around that goddamned yacht club, talking about boys.”

  Nicole looked at her gravely. “Such language, Caroline. But about the ‘goddamned yacht club,’ I understand. So what do you propose?”

  “Sailing. If I have to go by myself, I will.”

  Nicole glanced down, as if knowing that what Caroline most wanted was a change of heart. Softly, Nicole asked, “Would your father let you do that?”

  Caroline folded her arms. “He told me I could last summer. Whenever I felt ready.”

  “And you are?”

  “Yes.” Caroline hesitated, still hoping for a sign that Nicole would go with her, saw none. In a flat voice, she finished, “Can I go now, Mother?”

  For a long time, Nicole turned to gaze at the weather, eyes hooded. “When would you be back?”

  “By six o’clock.” Caroline made her voice indifferent. “There’s no point in getting back any sooner.”

  Nicole’s eyes were sad again. “All right,” she answered. “You can go.”

  The day was brilliant.

  It lightened Caroline’s heart, braced her defiance. For a moment, she forgot that her father, knowing the sudden treachery of oceans, never would have let her sail alone. She walked swiftly to the catboat without looking back.

  The boat was handsome and beautifully maintained—a twenty-foot Crosby, built in 1909. When her father had first shown it to her, a present for Caroline’s thirteenth birthday, she fought back tears of surprise.

  “Your birthday is special to me,” Channing said gently. “Sail this with the care you deserve.”