The Final Judgment

by Richard North Patterson

  “I am twenty-two.”

  Betty nodded in acknowledgment. “I understand. But you have to imagine this from his point of view—a daughter who’s been stable and predictable, with a boyfriend at home, suddenly can’t be found at pretty much any hour of the night. Don’t you think maybe you’d be a little concerned?”

  “It’s my life, isn’t it?”

  Betty’s brow knit. “Even Larry and I have worried a little—we don’t know this boy at all, you hardly seem to know him except to spend the night with, and even when you’re with us now, you’re not.” Betty paused, voice softening. “Would you mind terribly, Caroline, telling me a little about what’s going on?”

  Caroline felt her defensiveness die. She sat in the canvas chair next to Betty, gazing at the morning sunlight on the water. “I wish I knew.”

  Betty sipped her coffee. “Well, he is attractive.”

  Caroline shook her head. “It’s not just sex.” She paused, trying to find words. “It’s like I know so much more about him than what he tells me.”

  Betty seemed to reflect. “Has it occurred to you,” she said finally, “that maybe there’s nothing more to him than what he tells you—a rudderless guy without any deep interests but sailing? And that for reasons you haven’t coped with, you’re projecting your own needs on someone who’s a pretty blank screen?”

  Though Betty’s voice was not unkind, Caroline found that the words stung. “I don’t think I need a shrink, Betty.”

  “Really.” Betty’s voice was level and unimpressed. “How are things with Jackson?”

  Caroline looked away. “I don’t think I can talk about it now.”

  Betty considered her. “Then let me make one request, as your older sister: that you think about it. And that, while Father’s here, you cool things off with Scott a little. There’s no, point in upsetting Father over something you don’t understand yourself.”

  It was good advice, Caroline knew, and Scott did not disagree.

  “Do what you need to do,” he said. “Honestly, I understand.”

  “But we’ve only got four weeks left. And he’s staying for a week.”

  Scott shrugged. “He’s been your father for twenty-two years. And, pretty clearly, the main influence in your life.” He took her hand. “I don’t expect you to rock that boat, and I really don’t want you to. Certainly not on my account.”

  Why, Caroline wondered, did his understanding make her feel so diminished?

  Perhaps, she reflected, it bespoke the limits of her importance to him. Or perhaps it was simply that—like Betty—Scott accepted so easily that Caroline’s first obligation was to put Channing Masters at ease.

  She did not take Betty’s advice.

  For the first few days, Caroline spent most of her time with her father, doing many of the things—sailing, hiking, riding rented bikes—that she usually did with Scott. Even in his early fifties, Channing Masters was vigorous and fit, and he took keen pleasure in being outdoors in the company of his youngest daughter, his unspoken favorite. Whatever his concerns were, he kept them to himself, as if the time that Caroline gave him was reassurance enough. Her occasional absentmindedness seemed not to bother him. He was himself sometimes distracted by memories of Nicole, Caroline sensed; when he lapsed into silence, gazing at the water, Caroline could almost feel the hurt her mother had inflicted on him. As for Caroline, her pretense of normality seemed to satisfy him that nothing was so wrong that she need confront it.

  Caroline found that she disliked herself for this. But not nearly as intensely as she missed Scott.

  On the third night of her father’s visit, she came to the boathouse.

  As she approached the porch, Scott startled awake. He sat bolt upright, staring around him. And then she saw him freeze.

  “Caroline?” he asked.

  His voice was tight. “It’s me,” she answered.

  In the dark, she saw the shadow of his body relax.

  She went to the side of his bed, placing the kit that held her diaphragm on the nightstand. “I just missed you,” she said.

  Gratefully, Scott reached for her.

  But it was not the same. Caroline was used to bringing the rhythm of their days to their nights alone; now their love-making felt furtive, hurried, something divorced from the rest of her life. Some childish part of her imagined her father breaking in on them: in an odd, chilling moment, she recalled the image of her mother turning to face Caroline as she lay beneath Paul Nerheim.

  Scott seemed to sense this. Gently, he said, “It’s a little like high school, isn’t it? Sneaking down to the family room after the folks have gone to bed.”

  Caroline lay in the dark, listening to the waves splash beneath them, feeling the cool breeze across her naked skin. “Have you missed me at all?”

  Scott was quiet for a time. “Quite a lot, actually.” He paused, as if trying for a certain fatalism. “It’s just that you’ve got a father to pacify, and I can’t treat that like a tragedy—‘Romeo and Juliet at the Beach.’ Especially when all that’s at stake is your time until law school.”

  Why, Caroline thought, did she imagine a bitterness buried beneath the offhand realism? And who might he be bitter at?

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing.” He kissed her neck. “Don’t worry about me, Caroline. I’ve got no need to be a character in your family minidrama. Even if it’s a bit part.”

  In the darkness, she could not see his face.

  The next morning, she told her father that she would be sailing with a friend.

  Channing raised his eyebrows in pleasant inquiry. “Oh,” he asked. “Who?”

  “The caretaker from next door. He’s quite a good sailor.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  Caroline smiled. “Yes,” she said, and went to find Scott.

  When Scott opened the door, he did not smile at all.

  “How did you explain me?” he asked.

  “There’s nothing to explain. Are you coming, or am I going out alone?”

  Scott gave her an inscrutable look, hesitant, and then took his jacket from the peg beside the door. With a kind of rueful affection, he asked, “Are you familiar with the term ‘willful’?”

  Why, Caroline wondered, did so many moments—even words—now summon images of her mother? Seeing her expression, Scott’s smile vanished.

  “I guess you are,” he said.

  For the next two days, without explaining herself to anyone, Caroline spent time with Scott.

  He seemed almost to stand outside their time together, watching her. “Has it occurred to you,” he said softly, “that you’re using me?”

  They were drinking beer beside the boat, after a long day’s sail. “Using you for what?” she said.

  “To define your own territory.”

  Caroline gave him a long, level look. Quietly, she said, “When you can think of something better I can use you for, Scott, please let me know.”

  Their time, Caroline thought with sudden pain, was running out.

  That night, she came to him again.

  She left before dawn, lost in the feel of him, the chaos of her own thoughts. And then she noticed the dim light on the porch of the Masters house.

  She stopped on the beach, gazing up. Her father’s shadow stood in the semidark, still and silent, watching her.

  For a moment, in unspoken acknowledgment, neither moved.

  And then Caroline resumed her walk, crossing the beach and climbing the stairs to the bluff, to face him. She could feel her heart race. But when she reached the bluff, the light was off, and he was gone.

  Eight

  The next morning, at the breakfast table, her father was silent.

  Caroline sipped her coffee, trying to look composed. She had not slept.

  Larry seemed quite oblivious, chatting on about his thesis. But Betty, Caroline saw, kept looking from her father to her.

  When Caroline rose to help clear the dishes, her fathe
r raised a hand. “Caroline,” he said. “A word with you, please.”

  Larry glanced at him, newly aware. Betty touched Larry’s arm and motioned him to the kitchen.

  “Yes?” Caroline said.

  Her father folded his hands in front of him. His voice was quite calm. “I couldn’t help but notice that you spend a good deal of time with the boy next door, as it were. Before I go, I rather think I’d like to meet him.”

  Their eyes locked. “Why, Father?”

  “Because it seems polite to acknowledge your friends. And because, curiously, Betty and Larry claim not to know him.” His gaze grew pointed. “Which strikes me, whoever is at fault, as more than a little uncivilized. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Caroline felt cornered; her father knew, or guessed, who was “at fault,” and she had no excuse for Scott’s reclusiveness. The subtext of the night before lay silently between them.

  Caroline shrugged. “All that I can do, Father, is ask….”

  “Dinner?” Scott raised his eyebrows. “What are this man and I going to say to each other? And why does it matter to you?”

  “Because he knows how it is with us.”

  Scott shook his head. “But aren’t you the one you have to answer to?” he asked.

  Caroline crossed her arms. “You’d think you were crossing the Rubicon instead of facing one middle-aged man across the dinner table.” She paused, hearing herself, and then said softly, “Sometimes people just do things for other people. Please, don’t embarrass me.”

  Folding his hands, Scott propped them beneath his chin and stared out at the ocean, pensive. “All right,” he answered. “If it really means that much to you.”

  The first hour had a deceptive calm.

  To Caroline, Scott seemed another person—respectful to her father; amiable and pleasant to Betty and Larry; attentive to Caroline without overdoing it, so that the impression left was that he valued her. He helped Betty in the kitchen, talked to Larry about academic politics.

  He seemed wholly at ease, as if a polite dinner with a privileged family was second nature to him. Caroline saw Larry and Betty warm to him, and him to them. If he minded Channing Masters’ inquiries about his background—and Caroline was somehow certain that he did mind—he gave little sign.

  With cocktails over, they sat down at the dinner table. “Is it true,” Scott was asking Larry, “about publish or perish?”

  “Depends on the school.” Larry smiled. “Think there’s a spot for me at Ohio Presbyterian?”

  Scott seemed to reflect. “There should be. My last English course was more like a séance than a seminar. Even the dead dropped out.” His voice turned wry. “The professor had published extensively.”

  From the end of the table, Channing watched him. “Were you an English major?” he asked.

  Scott shook his head. “History. Twentieth-century European, mostly. It wasn’t very cheerful.”

  Channing did not smile. “History seldom is. And seldom will be. It’s in our nature, I’m afraid.”

  Caroline turned to her father. “That’s rather Hobbesian, isn’t it?”

  Channing seemed to consider her. “I don’t believe in the infinite perfectibility of man, Caroline. If I ever did, I stopped. In Germany.”

  Caroline looked to Scott. “Father served with the Nuremberg tribunal. As an investigator.”

  “Out of which,” Channing said to Scott, “I came to believe in law. But not in men. People are, in the end, who they are.”

  Her father’s eyes had fixed on Scott. “But men make laws,” Caroline interjected. “And write history. Like we’re trying to do in Vietnam.”

  She saw Larry surreptitiously cover his eyes and emit a silent groan. “The V word,” he murmured.

  Channing gave a slight smile and raised his eyebrows at Caroline. “You were saying, Caroline?”

  “That if the Vietnamese wrote history, and convened their own tribunal, Nixon and Kissinger might be condemned as war criminals.”

  Channing frowned. “I think that’s much too facile. What our government committed were not crimes of war but acts of war—”

  “They bombed civilians, Father. Thousands of them, and for what? To save face in a war we’ll never win and now don’t even plan to win. Because human beings are only pieces on their geopolitical chessboard.”

  Channing shook his head. “With respect, Communism is a form of tyranny which has killed at least as many people as the Nazis did. With whom you so blithely compare Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger.” His voice became gentle. “Forgive me, Caroline—you’re more than entitled to your own ideas. But I hardly think your maternal grandparents, who died at Auschwitz, would grant your comparison. Or even your own mother.”

  Caroline felt herself flush. Through her shame, she remembered that Nicole had felt much as she now did and that her father knew this. But it was beyond her now to say so.

  In the silence, she saw Scott gaze at her with deep surprise, and then compassion. Channing turned to him. “Tell me, Scott, do you have a view on this? Perhaps I’ve been too harsh.”

  Caroline saw Scott fold his hands. He paused, gazing at her father quite openly, as if coming to some decision.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said quietly. “But then I haven’t just been trumped with the death of six million Jews. Two of whom were my own grandparents.”

  Channing looked at him fixedly. To Caroline, everyone else were figures in a painting: Betty with her eyes downcast, Larry quite pale.

  “Do you believe,” Channing asked softly, “that the Vietnamese are our Jews?”

  Scott’s faint smile did nothing to his eyes. “What I’m saying,” he answered with equal quiet, “is that if the same platoon of Americans had marched into a German village and begun killing and raping everyone in sight until there was pretty much no one left, they wouldn’t have put out a record called ‘The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley.’ They’d have strung him up—”

  “And quite legitimately, I’m sure. But it does point out a larger problem with your reference to My Lai.” Channing’s voice took on a lethal quiet. “Because the young people with, shall we say, the ‘finer sensibilities’ have claimed the right to select their wars. Sensibilities so fine, in fact, that they left this war to those with so few advantages that Vietnam looks like a career opportunity. And to, as you put it, the war criminals. Whom the absence of their moral betters, safely deferred, deprived of so many good examples.”

  For a moment, the room was silent. “Yes,” Scott said. “I’m lucky that I haven’t had to die to justify my position. Which leaves me here, free to argue, among the living. Unlike my college roommate, who died there, uselessly.”

  Channing’s face hardened. Then, as if remembering himself, he looked suddenly embarrassed. “Please forgive me, Scott. I’ve become so used to argument and advocacy that I forget my role as host.”

  Scott seemed to study him. “No need to apologize,” he said. “My dad and I used to do this all the time. Before we stopped speaking.”

  In the nervous laughter that followed, Caroline saw that her father barely smiled.

  “Why haven’t you ever told me,” Scott asked an hour later, “about your mother?”

  Caroline did not face him. “It’s not the kind of thing that comes up.”

  They stood on his deck, hands on the railing, watching the Nantucket Sound at sunset. He turned to her. “But it’s important, don’t you think?”

  She tilted her head. Softly, she asked, “Do I know everything that’s important about you?”

  He did not answer. Caroline was quiet for a time. “Anyhow,” she said, “I’m very sorry. For starting that whole argument about Vietnam.”

  Scott’s eyes narrowed. “That wasn’t about Vietnam, Caroline. It was about you. And me and you.” He paused for a moment. “Do you really think there’s ever a time when your father doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing? And what he wants?”

  She touched his hand. “He’s been a good father, S
cott. By his own lights, he wants whatever seems best for me.”

  Scott’s hand closed around hers. “I always thought the test of a good parent,” he said softly, “was to raise adults.”

  Withdrawing her hand, Caroline felt herself stiffen. “Are you saying that I’m not one?”

  Scott’s eyes were still and serious. “What I’m saying,” he finally answered, “is that he may force you to choose. But the choice isn’t the one he imagines—between him and whatever bad stuff I or anyone else may symbolize for him.” He paused, ending quietly. “It’ll be between him and you.”

  She found her father on the porch, sipping a brandy. In the dusk, his eyes looked deep-set, shrouded.

  Caroline did not sit. “That was unforgivable,” she said flatly.

  He looked down. “Yes, I suppose it was. Especially when I insisted that he come.”

  He sounded genuinely contrite. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “Because I believe that ideas matter. That rigorous thought matters.” He looked away. “Perhaps it was more than that, Caroline. I find that being here, I think of Nicole.

  “I remember all she went through during the war, and what I thought I meant to her because of that—that I could somehow save her, when her own people could not. And then I think about Paul Nerheim.” He paused, finishing softly. “And, in spite of myself, I feel the anger of her betrayal. Which I inflicted on all of you at dinner, without meaning to. It was as if the two of you had cheapened what I felt. For which, of course, I’m quite ashamed.”

  It was painful for Caroline to hear this, to know how little the years of silent restraint had healed him. She felt her anger deflate, become the sadness of her own memories. There was, she thought, nothing more she could say.

  Caroline went to Channing and kissed him on the forehead. “Good night, Father.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” he asked mildly. “About Scott.”