A time would come, she’d imagined. A time to return. She would not have been able to guess its admittedly unconventional form, retracing the path now along the promontory that edged the river—it sparkled countless quick ships of light under the moon—with such a stranger. Another instant so self-important but unwittingly wrapped in its own invisible winding sheet and ready for burial.
He was talking, he was saying something. She stopped and looked down through the trees that framed the Hudson. Somewhere, far off, perhaps across the river itself, a car’s engine raced.
He was telling her to slow down. Why was he telling her to slow down? What was he doing now? Was he out of his mind, calling out like that up the path? His accent seemed more pronounced when his voice was raised like this, more emphatic in night silence, indeed not all that loud but more a sharp whisper made relatively strident in all the close calm. Or was it that edge, like a quaking or serration at its turns where the word broke into three, the tongue clapping the roof of his mouth. It was a dry sound. Mah-deh-lenn.
He had fallen behind. She knew the bridle path so well she had quickened the pace without noticing. As he caught up, a pale white spume of breath appeared with him.
“What are you doing?” she said, and her voice too seemed loud, as if her own voice here so near again to Berkeley house were rejected by the old air.
“I, you got ahead, and he doesn’t walk that fast, and,” Lupi took the viejo’s hand.
Madeleine saw this, no longer knew what to make of it. “You’ll be there soon,” she said, and continued forward.
“Listen, can I ask you a question?”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Senti, what am I supposed to do once we get there, four in the morning, what am I supposed to do in the middle of the night? I can’t just walk in in the middle of the night.”
“You can wait for morning, then.”
“You’ll wait too?”
“I already told you. No, I have just enough time to get back for the first train down. What you want to do once you reach the great Owen Berkeley’s is your business.” Lupi hadn’t heard this, however; he was certain now he could hear the breathing, regular and unlabored just as it had been in Honduras, behind, the occasional pebble overturned to scuttle down after the sole and his nervousness over what Krieger might do made his blood withdraw into his heart and belly, leaving the surface of skin exposed to the dense dew at which he shivered—Krieger, who preferred everything and everyone to be tipped to the side in order that he might appear to be standing up relatively straight. Fumbling for the collar he drew it up, struggled with the top button, blew into his cupped hands breath from down inside his body. He recalled, cupping—
Imagine a museum turned on its side to produce a free fall down a corridor, exhibitions flying past, with no chance to pause, to loiter and admire, maybe read the wall label—which brought out in him a kind of renewed adolescent sense of things? He didn’t mind. These were fresh sensations. This reemergence of a feeling of his helplessness and the newness of the world had made him susceptible to something that developed within the last days, unexpectedly, happened so naturally that he never noted it for what it was until now, cupping his hands to warm them before his face.
Henry Work; Henry. Madeleine’s Henry, Hannah’s, but also his own. Lupi had recounted for Henry the story of Milo’s abduction, the crossroads faced below Fiesole, the Christmas theft at the house of his parents, and explained (if only to fill up the silence left by Henry’s attention, which amplified his sense of guilt about the incident) that he returned to them what he had stolen, by mail.
Henry’s response: “If I’d been your pa I’d found you and brought you home to where you belong.”
They were down in the pasture. He had reached the point where he could no longer bear sitting up with Olid, who communicated less and less. He had told Henry his story, not knowing why. He had heard Henry’s words and walked away. Henry kept talking. He had eight cousins. Five had been to jail at one time or another. Not that jail is a place of redemption. A stall to rot in. Some had since been set free, some hadn’t. What he was getting at was time is a good tool, time can be put to work.
Lupi had walked away along the painted walls staring at the rural frescos, stroked out in a multitude of colors which became more abstract the closer one approached. Much of the brush work had been accomplished furiously with what seemed to be a matte-finish house paint. Henry told him Hannah had painted the walls herself. The tracklights were on timers with mechanized rheostats (an affair of winches and pulleys, thin iron rods arranged in rows with hooks at the bottoms through which wire was run laterally in series) that effected an indoor sunrise and sunset scheduled more or less to be coincident with their counterparts in the world outside. Filters which hung by cord down the row of lights could be lowered by hand one bank at a time to fall in front of the bulbs to create a rosy dawn or brilliant puce sundown glow. Henry was fond of this supplementary attachment, which was of his own devising, and generally he was the one who amused himself and troubled the roosters with its possibilities.
At that moment it was just past sunrise, filters dropped into place for a warm, humid midsummer day. Lupi came back, sat beside Henry on a low stool, knees spread wide, and considered the movie prospects of the scene just set into motion: who would ever have thought that a matinee cowboy like me, my hero, would find out his own old daddy was black as the bore of his pistol? “You’d have had a time finding me, nobody else was able to,” he said, though the other voice had not altogether faded.
“I’d of found you.”
“Maybe,” res ipsa loquitur.
“I’d of found you without hardly any trouble at all.”
Into the mottled silver steel pail the rhythmic streams of milk shot. Out of the corner of his eye Henry could see how intently Lupi watched him.
“Tell me, you ever done this?”
“No.”
“Well then, want to give it a go?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on now, nothing to be afraid over.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid, I just don’t think I want to.”
“Here you go, give’r a whirl,” said Henry, climbing from his knees, fingers glistening like rubber as he steadied himself against the flank. This was an exercise in balances and counterbalances to which the cow was accustomed. She neither flinched, withdrew, nor looked about with her noble head to train a violet eye on the man at her side.
“I, just—”
“Get in there,” he said, amused and tender.
“Like this?”
Henry wiped his hands on the back of his overalls. “That’s right, go on. They ain’t gonna bite. Grab it, no get that one there, that’s fine. That one too, take them both.”
“Like this?”
“You’re just fondling. Don’t do that, you’re liable to—”
Henry was laughing, affable, benevolent, administrative.
“Well, how then?”
“Look, like this here,” extending his arms around Lupi, whose frame felt dwarfed within the half-embrace, and, as if he were knotting his first cravat or coaching him through his first attempt at tying a shoelace, grasped his hands forthwith over the cow’s teats, began to squeeze and knead.
“No, easy,” he urged, chin settled briefly on the other’s shoulder, their ears bumping. “Relax man.”
“I, just, but—”
Until the blue-white milk came forth in hard living streams, first from the left and shortly after from the right, and Henry released his grip, slowly, remained hunched over him, pantomiming the proper motions, conducting his hands, all Lupi could think was how absurd a situation this was. By what prerogative? he wondered. His chest heaved. Riddle and regret. But when the milk came and he could hear Henry’s pleased chuckle and smell his fresh warm breath across his ear and cheek his heart released and he heard himself exclaiming, “Guard’ un po’ che bello.”
“There you go
t it.”
“I do I think.”
“Don’t stop now, keep it going, keep going.”
Too full, the moment became unhinged until there was a twist, a mischief, an alteration so that within that moment all was feint, simulation. Its irrational joy flew free of nonmovie. For the time it took to quarter-fill the pail, for Henry to slap him on the back and (was it possible?) tousle the hair at the back of his head. The joy soon ended. No. This was a sad, sappy, sentimental movie, like the early one Lupi once saw that starred the child Elizabeth Taylor and her mutt-dog which she trained to be a shepherd dog, the same dog her otherwise adorable brothers mistook for a deer while they were hunting, which they shot, but of course after a dark period of tribulation and after the vet had come and said there was nothing more to be done the mutt-dog got well again, only to be run over by a truck, and again survive, what was the title of that movie? the smeary superreal colors, the puppy forever in some sort of trouble, and Elizabeth Taylor devoted to it through to the very end?
Lupi stood up smiling against what he knew was next as the dominant feeling of precariousness and moreover emptiness—that, surely—pressed in again. But he had milked a cow. Everything was possible. Henry had seen the funny crimp in the smile as Lupi got up, his cheeks reddening, overreacting to the smallest most basic gesture in the world. The smile was full, but already showed a shadow.
Movies. He had seen too many, had made too many up. This was movie also. He was catapulted onto a shiny screen. It happened, it always happened whether he resisted or not. Milo had felt like movie, or had at times. The whole thing shaken out when the children screaming and caroling turned the corner. The thing a little recovered in the burglary, when the door to the safe came open, as he loaded pockets with possessions not his. There were many movies. Black-black-haired girl, far too young for a political conscience, was it in Bologna, the bomb intended for the commuter train: she was movie. The bomb had either not been planted or it failed. He was gone. He was in Sardinia. Sardinia had succored movies. The camera left behind in Capri, the ferry missed, the connection stupendously criminal for the first time, and the night spent in under rock shelves that shot out over the white sand, the cold tide rolling up to within a few meters of where he lay. That was movie, nearly completely. And now the river here. It was dimmer, and surely its waves could not be heard. He heard them. The character at the center of the scenario correctly assumed a shiver ran through him, causing his teeth to clatter. They did so in a fit, a paroxysm, then stopped.
Madeleine was close to him. She seemed old, her face harsh, and her hair was lusterless in the starlight where everything is glazed with sheen. Her cheeks seemed meager. He felt as if he ought to kiss her on the cheek, or on her lips. Not penetrating but chaste, and he tipped one shoulder forward to do it before her words came through.
Someone was following, she said. Back on the bridle path. She was sure of it. Steps up the old station staircase. Maybe, she had told herself, it had only been the two of them trailing behind.
“I think you’re probably wrong,” he lied softly into her face.
The movie-feeling gave way to seeing this other deception—the tangible one—through. As the movie languished so did the desire to kiss Madeleine. It occurred to him how shocked she might have been had the performance carried him forward.
“No, I’m—”
She was studying the brush and the trees below. Lupi hesitated.
“We can wait. I can go back. You wait here, and I can go back and look.”
Was it the movie again that made Lupi feel less afraid for himself than Olid, or her or by extension Henry, even Hannah?
“No,” she said. “Nothing, it wouldn’t matter if it were, something, this is all your business.”
“No, I mean—”
“Let’s just get it over with,” turning.
“Whatever you think, that’s what I’ll do.”
She turned and looked hard at him. He wanted to say something that might prevent her from insulting him, thought to repeat, “That’s what I’ll do,” but suspected it would only benefit that audience beyond Madeleine—the greater one, the one not so substantial, since inexistent: the movie watchers. Whatever it was she had said they might collectively have heard; he hadn’t. Its tone had not been contemptuous, but acknowledging, an altogether different note.
Nothing further was audible from below. Above, the house was squared as a mass within irregular shapes and textures of flora. Its chimneys, sharp-pitched gables sandwiched between constellations.
Along the parapet they approached this black confection. By contrast, the grass beneath their feet, blanched under the moon, and the soil beds—circular, a fancy octagon around the south corner—showed the house was still being cared for, at least minimally; someone had mowed in expectation of winter; the wilted flowers had been dug under. They walked the perimeters.
“Now what?”
Madeleine thought, Maybe he’s dead.
The kitchen door was neither boarded over nor locked. Inside, there lingered the faint aroma of cooked meat (fish, but also an odor of gas). She felt her way forward into the room, and as her fingers found the switch, so familiar an object, cool, rim consumed by so many fingers into roundness, her thought moved toward the conviction, he was dead.
A single light came on, in the pantry. It threw easy shadows over the kitchen. A skillet sat on the stove. On the counter were tins of food and a disarray of utensils. There was a provisional, a transient feeling to the arrangement, obtrusive but unwilling to move in. Lupi, too, might have noticed this but he was taking all cues from her face (just as Olid looked to Lupi) rather than rely on any insights of his own. A difficult read, engrossed and changing as the eyes took in every surface. Enough time had passed (though it was hard to measure under the exhaustion of the journey, and the anxiety—still present—of the Krieger apparition) and Lupi spoke.
“I take you back to that, where that path comes off the road. I find my way back.” (He was exhausted, the English was crumbling.)
She was already into the adjoining room.
Threads, tapers, ribbons, blotches, a variously faint light bled through the chinks in the windows, lending more a transparency to the air than illumination. Stumbling, his palm faltering onto the carved newel, an acorn, its foliation snagging his fourth finger, where the ring would have popped on the mahogany, he found himself awkwardly following the dimmest trace of her, the quick creaking and padding her foot coaxed along the hallway and ascending these stairs.
Was it another lamp flashed on behind them below where they had just come?
On the long landing Madeleine slowed down. Seemed to be light up here, too—not the yellowish hue of the bulb that gave up the stairs (the staircase Lupi saw, with its half-landing at the turn, much like that in Fiesole, though there the steps were made of marble, the cheaper material at the time), rather the thin frost-white through glass.
Yet another light came on and Madeleine went to it. The door was ajar. The face she saw was guileless, much older than she could have thought. There was a running behind them in the hallway, the thuds restrained on the thick oriental carpet.
Lupi understood something had gone wrong. He took Olid’s sleeve and pulled him, in a single movement, to his side. When Krieger entered the room, a wide and reputable smile across his face, he took the envelope from Lupi without even looking at him, stretching his other hand out as his head twitched to one side—a gesture of obscene apology—and said, “Mr. Berkeley, this is all so, you know you simply haven’t made this easy,” and Maddie fled the house.
VII
The Reparation of Chelsea
1.
THE VARIOUS DAWNS’ early lights. All of the little blindered suns cast their artificial radiance over the landscape of the loft. The hens that lived in the old berlin wagon began to come alive. So did the cocks that were perched in a row on its decayed hood, the cocks that crowed proudly and adjusted their feathers and stabbed beaks at the feet o
f others crowding their roost. Lengths of cable soon pulled taut across the ceiling. The circular tinted filters rotated into place under the bulbs and gave the atmosphere a fresh morning hue. Basking under them, these suns, their artificer stirred and the sweet, wet, friendly tongue of the dog ran across her cheek. “Oh, go away,” she said. Tail wagging, the dog stepped back, barked, two sharp yaps, then two more. Hannah winced. She had a galloping hangover.
Outside, the city was clustered under its own sunrise whose air was so sharp and fixed that each building and every brick and beam and chiseled stone in it seemed to emanate its own live glow. Crisp wisps of smoke from chimneys, green billows of steam from grates and manholes along the street, curled upward into a clean blue.
Flat on her back she came toward consciousness, but through the unpleasant sensation of cold concrete. This penetrated skin and skull, as a humid wound, at one with her spine, a pain so at home it did not deign to pulsate.
She waited through the minutes that were required to wake up. The dream this pain had called her back from tarried, tattered and beat as a clock whose works were hooked up wrong so that the hands ran backwards from noon to morning to midnight. There was something about a monster, something about people, men, women, children, out along an old road, and they had their belongings with them but no homes to put them in. She wondered if they might not be refugees; she also had the nagging feeling she had been with a group of children gathered in a circle playing marbles, the only girl among the noisy boys, her hair pulled back and tucked into the collar of her shirt.
The bottle of Jamaican rum inches from her eye went some way toward explaining why her body ached. Such a scene of contentment on the bottle’s label. The sugar-cane field. The honest laborer on whose shoulder were slung stalks of sugar cane, smirch of smile daubed on his swarthy face—a happy worker. The factory with its benign brown smokestack behind. The three kegs of rum neatly nestled under the yellow Caribbean sky.
“Rum?” her head toiled—it had to have come from Hammond’s locker, for rum was Hammond’s weakness, not Hannah’s; rum and Coke, a mixture he was not proud of loving so. Myer’s Jamaican came to Hammond early, through his grandmother to whom in life there were three things worth living for: her dachshunds, her bingo, and her rum. Her rum she cut with lemon juice and honey. This was a drink she called bash. The dachshunds grew grand long livers lapping bashes. Hammond, who liked his bashes as much as any dachshund, learned when he got older to hide the bottles in his locker, because other transient ranch workers agreed to a man (and Hammond had, shyly, to agree with them) that rum was too damn exotic a drink for one who works with his two hands.
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