—
IT TOOK SEVERAL MINUTES, ONCE ALDEN WAS ON HIS WAY— FOLLOW-ing Arthur in the direction of the Mall—before he could relax again, and begin to appreciate, in the way that he’d hoped that he would, the weight of the object he carried: its great, explosive potential at his side. The problem was easily overcome, of course. He would simply announce to both Arthur and Douglas that he was needed back home, make as if to depart, and then (when he was quite sure he was unseen) double back toward the Mall. With this decided, he allowed his mind to drift, more pleasantly, in other directions. He saw himself at some indeterminate point in the future explaining to an admiring crowd his own (admittedly small, he would modestly protest) part in bringing the whole thing off. But, enough of that, he chastised himself—as he often did when his imagination ran away with him. If he imagined something like that, in exactly the way he wished it might occur, well—it was quite obvious that it would not. If, however, he managed to leave his projections of the future—his hopes and ambitions, his greatest desires—to the best of his ability unthought, there remained a greater degree of chance that the arrangement of events as they actually came to pass would take the shape and particularities of those as yet unarticulated desires. It worked the other way as well. If something terrible crossed his mind (as just at that moment, walking beside Douglas and Arthur, it did: How could, he wondered, the explosive power he had recently been charged with possibly be contained within the precise and limited dimensions of the device he carried? How could any who regarded him not instantly recognize what he himself recognized so well? It was the future itself he bore upon his person now, exposing it—and himself—at every moment to the inherent risk that it be wrested from him—and before it was time!) another thought would occur to him, and that was that, since the latter thought had been thought at all, it would not now, could not (by some law of reason, the details of which he could not be aware) come to pass. The complicating fact that he had also thought this second thought—that the first could not come to pass—did not trouble him overmuch; at least he was guaranteed that it should not.
So distracted by these thoughts was he that Alden hardly noticed when the crowd around him, which had until then been largely moving with them, thickened; then began—so slowly that at first it seemed accidental—to move in the opposite direction. To push back upon itself, pressure building, until there was just: a sudden swell of bodies. Moving as one, and according to a will and direction all its own.
Alden moved with it. There was no time to consider why, or in what direction; to wonder what was happening, or how it had begun. There was no way of measuring distances, in either space or time, and because of it—of those moments, as he was pushed along; through and under; as the crowd surged around him like a wave—he remembered hardly anything at all.
Nothing, that is, until the hit. Until a sound like hard gravel being ground underfoot caused him to turn; to realize that the sound had been a brick, just then connecting squarely with the skull of Douglas Sinclair.
In response, Douglas had lurched forward, uttered a startled cry, which, even above the noise of the crowd, Arthur (already several paces farther on) heard.
He turned. Saw his son’s forehead glistening with blood, and—a look crossed his face. Then his fist went soaring through the air, and (as though it had known in advance, even before the brick had been thrown, where it would land) connected with the jaw of a soldier from the 12th Infantry Regiment, just then advancing with the rest of MacArthur’s men.
There was nothing then—no memory at all—until he found himself sitting beside Douglas and Arthur on the hard, ridged police van floor, Douglas’s forehead gushing with blood. Arthur with his hand pressed to the scalp of his son, his voice a low, repetitive moan, which seemed, even as the words were spoken—My boy, he said; my boy, my boy—already lost.
There was: Being ordered to stand. Being searched. The bag he still carried slung over his shoulder wrenched from him. Opened. There was his own horror as the hand of an officer lifted the small box entrusted to him less than an hour before; himself being shoved, brutally, from behind, so that in another moment he was sent sprawling to the floor, choking for some reason, the air emptied from his lungs.
There was a sudden flood of relief. Not only at the return of breath to his lungs, but at having been relieved of the object—in whatever way. It hardly mattered to him now. He sat, choking and spluttering, even weeping a little with the pure relief he felt at having whatever it was that had been begun—whatever it was that he had, in a capacity he could not name, found himself part—was now, however ingloriously, at an end.
There was the dark underground cell; his back pressed to the wall, in order to cool the bruise that was quickly forming there. There was: The door being opened. Once again, being ordered to stand. There was Arthur, ordered forward. Arthur hesitating. Unwilling, or unable, to remove his hand from the forehead of his son, though the bleeding had stopped now. Had dried in a thick crust (more black than red) in the boy’s hair.
There was: Arthur, again, ordered forward. Arthur, complying this time. Then two men, talking in low voices; seeming to agree. A tattered hat placed, for some reason, on Arthur’s head. Arthur’s hand flying up—defensively—in order to remove it. Two men holding it fast.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL much later—a week or so after his return—that Alden came to know anything more about the hat Arthur had worn that afternoon, or any of the other circumstances surrounding his release. When, once more, the cell door clanged and he was informed that he alone was free to go, he simply rose and—nodding once, grimly, in Douglas’s, then Arthur’s direction—followed the officer to the open door. It is possible that—having accepted, without question, the exceptional quality of his fate—he did not think of it again. That he did not pause, even for a moment, to consider under what exceptional circumstances he might have been allowed (without once being questioned regarding either the origin or direction of the lethal object wrested from him the day before) to be so simply returned to his parents’ home— bruised and embarrassed, but otherwise unscathed.
He was sullen and, especially at first, did his best to avoid all but the most necessary contact—even with Sutton. He felt personally affronted whenever she, or his parents, or even Germaine, interrupted his painful musings on what had, or had not, so recently occurred. But this did not happen often, as they, too, were wary and left him, for the most part, alone. And as the days passed, and the dark bruise on his back began slowly to heal, he found it became easier for his mind to drift away from the past. Before long—though from time to time the riots, the Indian, Arthur and Douglas, Biggs in the distance, would swim again into view—it became nearly reflexive for Alden to push them, whenever they surfaced, quite altogether from his mind. What was done was done, he counseled himself; it was hardly worthwhile to dwell on the thing. And besides: it was absurd, and even somewhat vain, to suppose (with the way things had gone in the end) that any action on his part might have had even the slightest effect on the event as a whole. In fact, it was probably for the best he had been intercepted when he was, the object confiscated, and no greater harm done. At times he even indulged in a certain feeling of smug superiority. If he had only been entrusted, he thought to himself, weeks, days, even hours before, the whole thing might have gone off differently. From the safety of the present, it was easy to imagine himself in the past far braver and more willing than he really had been, or was. Despite this—and whatever he might be able, quite reasonably, to say in his defense—he did not fool himself into thinking that either Biggs or the Indian would be quick to ask for his help again. Perhaps there was some relief in that, too. It would be best for all involved, he decided emphatically, to avoid them—and anyone else connected with the party—for some time.
—
IN THE EVENINGS, HE WAS PRESSED INTO HIS MOTHER’S SERVICE IN the assembly of a large, seemingly unsolvable jigsaw puzzle, which she had spread out on a low table in her private room at th
e back of the house. Very slowly, as the days and then the weeks began to pass, an English country garden gradually emerged into view. A white trellis, laden with red and yellow flowers. Shutters, a cobbled path, the fine spray of a weeping willow at the bottom-left-hand edge of the frame. Though Alden had protested at first (Sutton, without hesitation, had flatly refused), he was, in truth, grateful for his mother’s silent company come evening. For the mild frustration, a sort of rigorous boredom, that overcame him in those quiet evening hours when confronted by the scattered pieces of that unsolvable puzzle, and its small satisfactions, as— piece by piece—they brought it closer to its end.
One evening, however, his mother broke the silence he had come to rely upon—to take almost for granted—since his return to his parents’ house. Not even his father had yet spoken to him directly about what had occurred (or failed to) and, in sharp contrast to the atmosphere that had reigned in the house before the riots, the only sounds to be heard during mealtimes now were of Germaine’s heavy tread as she delivered the plates from the kitchen, and the persistent clatter of cutlery on glass. He could only assume—so silent had his father so far remained on the subject—that his mother and Sutton knew nothing (or very near nothing) of what had happened at all.
You know, his mother said to him, however—quietly, one evening, and in so casual a tone that at first he suspected she might simply complete the sentence with “I’ve been hunting for this piece for over an hour”—it’s Sutton you have to thank.
What? Alden said. So surprised was he by his mother’s words that it was really as if, at first, he hadn’t heard. Then, having made sense of the words, but not yet even beginning to guess at their meaning, he added, incredulous: For what?
His mother was regarding him carefully now. Alden could not remember a time when she had looked at him like that. Not since, perhaps, his earliest childhood. As if she could … see him. And not just him as he was in that moment, but—all the way down. As if she knew him, better than he knew, or was ever likely to know, himself. He shifted uncomfortably under her gaze, and realized with a hot flash of shame how unreasonable it was of him to suppose that there was anything at all his mother did not know.
It was she who saved you, his mother said. It is probable that—without her help—even your father wouldn’t have been able to; the sort of (only now did she drop her gaze) trouble you were in. Only now did her hands become suddenly restless, smoothing, nervously, the fabric of her pleated skirt, before returning to the table in order to hunt out the missing pieces still scattered there.
Alden, confused, sat opposite, shaking his head. What? he said again.
So his mother, in a steady voice, which surprised him—neither gentle nor severe—as though she were recounting to him a subject that had now, to either one of them, only the most immaterial connection—explained to him everything she could about what had passed between Sutton and the Judge on the morning following the riots. About the hat—and the man who would be wearing it, and about how (as the Judge told Sutton then, and Alden must surely—his mother urged him—know himself) what at first might appear to be a stretching of the truth at times corresponded more accurately to the truth than the truth itself …
Alden’s mind spun.
The hat, the hat.
He remembered it all too clearly. How Arthur had locked arms with the tall officer, attempting to remove what had not—what never had— belonged to him.
How could Sutton—he thought—knowing? She must—he considered—have recognized, known—and not merely because she was told, been able, simply—
But then the rest of the story began to settle in his mind.
Who, then—he considered, finally—would have been left to take the charge? A cold chill—of recognition; at last, of understanding—ran the length of Alden’s spine. He got up unsteadily. His right leg had fallen asleep beneath him, he found, and now the feeling returned painfully.
I just thought you should know, his mother said, looking up at him. Uncertain—apologetic now. I just thought— she said. But he did not wait to hear what she thought. And he never would know, because the subject was never broached between them again.
AFTER THAT, JUST AS before the riots, Alden began to spend as little time at his parents’ house as he could. He left early in the morning, shortly after rising, and did not return until after dark. Now, though, because he had nowhere else to go—it was to Jack Nancy’s house that he went.
—
JACK NANCY, THE YOUNGER— ONETIME ALEXANDRIA COUNTY FOOT-ball star—had been laid up all that summer, 1932, with a strain to his lower back. Alden spent most of August laid up alongside Jack—at Jack’s mother’s place in Kalorama. They stayed inside, in Jack’s big upstairs room, ringing the bell and ordering more tea and food. The maid, a Negro, by coincidence also named Nancy, lumbered, frowning, all month long, up and down the stairs. The more old Nancy frowned, the more young Nancy rang that bell. Alden laughed.
You got it coming, Li’l Nancy, he’d say.
But he never did. The lines of old Black Nancy’s frown only deepened throughout the afternoon, finally becoming so dark and set, her eyes so fixed in her head, and her movements so increasingly rigid as she set down each tray, that by three o’clock in the afternoon it seemed that instead of, like everyone else, being made out of flesh and blood, she had been carved out of stone. They whittled away at her all afternoon. The trays arrived, growing so heavy as the day wore on that soon the glasses were rattling and the tea was sloshing around in each glass, spilling out sometimes over the rim as it was set down abruptly before them, and left to puddle on the tray. As if to compensate for Black Nancy’s increased sourness, young Nancy stirred more sugar in his tea, and with every teaspoon became more lighthearted, so that by midafternoon his misery would be quite forgotten. The pain of his lower back would slowly dissipate, and soon he would be raised on an elbow, regaling Alden with fantastic accounts of his past and future glories. He was like his old man in that way—Nancy the Elder. He liked to hear himself speak. He was an old money man, the elder Nancy—who had somehow got himself tangled up in politics. Now he was a senator. Funny the way life goes, he’d say, as though he had had no hand in the business. Everyone, including Judge Kelly, had always liked the elder Nancy, especially from a little distance. Once you were in the same room together and got him talking, though, it was nearly impossible to get him to stop. Everything reminded him of something else, and when you finally managed to escape, it was through a gap in the story that in no way resembled the one through which you came.
It’s like his tongue isn’t hinged on right, the Judge said. It flaps.
Nancy the Younger was just the same, only he had less to be reminded of and so less to recollect. With him, it was always the fiftysix-yard field goal with which he’d managed to secure the champion-ship win for Eastern High as a freshman back in ’29, or the time he’d caught his sister in the hall closet with his father’s secretary—who, when Li’l Nany had discovered them, had covered his face with his hands, neglecting his more private parts. Never once did he talk about the one thing Alden was genuinely curious about: the occasion when, at the age of five or six, Li’l Nancy (who apparently had a knack for stumbling upon his family members at their most compromised) had discovered his grandfather, Old Mister Nancy, dangling from a ceiling hook at the old Kalorama place. That was shortly before they had moved to the Hill and their fathers, then they themselves, had become friends. And when it came to it, if it was a friend you wanted, you couldn’t get much better than Li’l Nancy. Alden knew that. Especially that summer. He would talk your ear off, that was sure, and never about the thing you wanted him to, but still you’d never be bored, listening. Even when you’d heard the same story a thousand times. There was something about him that held your attention that way— and even Black Nancy, though she pounded up those stairs with a fatally heavy tread in the waning hours of each day, was so crazy about him that when he died, ten years later—late Septemb
er 1942— his plane spiraling into the waters of the North Atlantic, she cried for six days straight. Then, on the seventh day, Mrs. Nancy suffered a stroke, leaving the left side of her face completely paralyzed and destroying her ability to eat or speak. This brought Black Nancy up short. She said, If it ain’t the one thing, it’s sho’ enough the othah— and there wasn’t any use in crying about it. This was all recorded in a letter Sutton wrote to Alden shortly thereafter, so that was how he came to know about it.
That was the same year, incidentally—1942—their own father, Judge Kelly, died. Mary Kelly, who had for some time by then resided at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, just outside the city, and who rarely involved herself, even by way of the most cursory response, in the more ordinary happenings of the world, including those most ordinary happenings of all, life and death, and who barely batted an eye when her own husband’s death was announced, had shaken her head when she heard.
Black Nancy, she said, was the only good thing that ever happened to that family.
But that was all still sometime in the future.
MRS. NANCY HAD BEEN an inveterate “cave dweller,” as the old money types of the Kalorama District were known, who couldn’t “hack it” (her own words) in town. When Jack had been twelve, she had divorced the elder Nancy and moved back to Kalorama for good, taking Jack and Black Nancy with her. (Alden had heard her say it himself: “I couldn’t hack it,” she’d said—her sensitive nose pink at the edges and quivering slightly—as if her marriage had been nothing more complicated or binding than a challenging round of golf.)
So it was in the company of three of the Nancys: Mrs. Nancy, Li’l Nancy, and old Black Nancy, that Alden spent that last, unsufferably hot month of the summer of 1932. Stuffing himself on Black Nancy’s sweet tea and sandwiches.
I’m going to be a big fat man, just like my father, Jack would say miserably, just before noon. But by four o’clock he would be raised on an elbow again. I am, after all, within my rights, he would inform Alden smugly, to be a fat man if I so choose and desire. But you—he said— pointing a thick finger at his friend, or swiping away the half-finished plate of sandwiches as Alden reached for another—you have no excuse. Who—he said, his mouth, at the corners, already beginning to break into a wide grin—ever heard of a fat Commie ?
Quartet for the End of Time Page 14
