IT HAPPENED THAT LOUIS’S father—a small-claims lawyer from Sioux City, Iowa—was personal friends with Harry Hopkins, supervisor of the Federal Relief Administration: so that was how, the following spring—June 1937—they both landed jobs with the Farm Security Administration, better known as the FSA.
They drove south. Through Virginia and North Carolina. Then west, through Tennessee. Passed through Dry Fork and Danville; through Long View and Cherokee; through Pigeon Forge, Friendsville, Ellendale, Bells …
They would turn up at the local diners, order coffee and pie, and, after they had succeeded in obtaining the names and general whereabouts of a few tenant farms in the area, drive off to find them. Sometimes it took all afternoon, but nearly always they found their way somewhere. That was the easy part. Once they arrived, it was more difficult. More often than not the families refused to be photographed. They would shrug their shoulders and insist that it could be of no particular importance that anyone in the city “get a look” at this, or that— gesturing off as they said so, in the direction of the house or the yard, or even on occasion toward themselves. Sutton and Louis would have to argue that, just the opposite, it was exactly “this” or exactly “that” that, despite what they wanted, people needed to see. It was their job, they said, to see that they did.
When a thing isn’t seen, they explained—especially in Washington—it’s just as if, sometimes, it doesn’t exist at all. But it was a difficult point to make because when they were asked anything specific—like who exactly would see their photographs, and what “real” things would be their direct result—their answers couldn’t be anything but vague. They themselves had no idea where their photographs would go, or what impact they might have—if any. But for a while they had faith that they would indeed have an impact, and that any impact was genuine, and being genuine was good. They still believed, in other words, that it was possible to do what they’d been asked. To press into the frame of each photograph they took a corresponding reality—as though it were the responsibility not only of themselves, but of the page, to absorb the world in perfect ratio, one to one.
THEY DROVEON. TO JONESBORO, ARKANSAS. WEST PLAINS, MISSOURI. To Ozark, Bolivar, Dunnegan, Stockton … And everywhere they went, especially as they drew near the Kansas border, Sutton looked for Arthur. For Douglas.
How she might recognize them if she saw them, she didn’t know. After so much time had passed, she had only the most abstract image of either one of them left in her mind. And even that—when she tried to hunt after it—seemed nearly always to swim from her grasp. If she didn’t think of it, there they would be: she was fairly haunted by them. But always, just as—sensing their presence—she turned toward them in an effort, at last, to finally apprehend them … they would, just as easily, be gone.
What did not leave her, what had never left her—even after all the years that had now passed in between—was the moment she had stood, seeing but unseen, opposite her brother and Arthur—Arthur nearly unrecognizable even then. His face scratched and bloodied—wearing, for some reason, another man’s hat …
What did not leave her was the moment in which—as though impelled by some force beyond her—she raised her own hand toward that hat. And the knowledge that—though it had indeed seemed as though she’d been impelled by some force, beyond her—there had, in the end, been no one but she who had raised her hand; who had pointed at Arthur Sinclair and identified him, falsely, as the guilty man.
IT WAS ON A visit to Washington, just before her departure with Louis that spring, that Sutton had made her first—concerted—attempt to locate some record of Arthur Sinclair: a whole afternoon spent scanning through the courthouse register, searching for some evidence of his arrest back in 1932. She found none.
The clerk had shrugged when she finally worked up the nerve to inquire.
That was a busy afternoon, he said, when she mentioned the date. No question there’d be some came through and released without any record at all.
She returned the next day, this time taking out all the records from October 1932 through November 1934. She scanned through them slowly, one page at a time. It was tedious work, and after a while the names and dates began to all blur together so that she worried that even if Arthur’s name did appear she wouldn’t recognize it.
But then—suddenly (she need never have worried)—there it was. Trembling, distinct, and alone against a sea of other names, which, rather than distracting from it, served instead to set it apart. Beneath the typeset date, February 6, 1933, exactly what she had been looking for: the name Arthur Sinclair, and beside it, clearly marked in red, a single word: Released. She had not realized the extent of the relief she would feel until she felt it. Until she saw his name there, in legible letters, and that single word, indicating that he (and, accordingly, she herself) had been set free—and, indeed, some time ago.
She gazed at that name and its accompanying date for a long time. Then, very slowly, very deliberately, she closed the book and returned the stack to the clerk.
Had she found what she needed? he asked. Coolly—as though he hardly expected a reply.
Yes, she said. Yes, thank you, I have. She turned to go then—but something stopped her. No doubt her reply had surprised the clerk. She had seen it—she was nearly certain of it: something flicker behind his otherwise impassive gaze. After all, she considered, it must be very rare that—spending his days overseeing the consultation of so many years of dusty files—he might observe—indeed, have a hand in—the retrieval of some fragment, however minute and ultimately inconsequential, against that tide.
She turned back. There was really perhaps no one with whom it would be more fitting to share the news.
For some time, she told the clerk then, she had been concerned over the fate of a certain Arthur Sinclair—of whom she had not had any news since his incarceration back in 1932. It now seemed—she continued— that though she had yet to find any record of his having actually been admitted, it was clearly recorded that he had in fact been released from county jail, in February 1933.
But now the clerk appeared distracted. He blinked, and once again— unmistakably now—something flashed behind his eyes.
I know that name, he said. Twice more he blinked. Yes, I am almost certain of it. Arthur Sinclair. Again: blink. It wasn’t so long ago I had an inquiry after the very same man. Yes, I am quite sure of it. Wait, will you? Wait here a moment.
He disappeared behind the stacks.
Anxiously, Sutton awaited his return. After a while she began to feel a little ill. She looked around for a place to sit down. There wasn’t any.
Finally—nearly twenty minutes must have passed—the clerk returned, his thumb pressed among the pages of a book.
Yes, he said, it’s here.
Now he laid the book open flat on the counter between them and jabbed at something on the page.
Yes, unmistakably: for the second time in one afternoon, there it was. Arthur Sinclair.
But what could it mean? Sutton looked at the name, then at the clerk, then back at the name blankly.
The Missing Persons Bureau, the clerk said. Arthur Sinclair has been listed in the book since—he squinted at the date: August 1932.
But— Sutton began. If the file was made before the recorded release, it must have simply been a matter of … she paused. Somehow—temporarily—losing track of him during that time; that afterward—
The clerk shook his head.
No, he said. It’s indicated that the name has been reentered every year since, and I can quite clearly recall, myself—only last month, in fact—a young man once again making inquiries. Which is why—you see—the name, just now, so clearly rang a bell—
And the young man—Sutton interrupted. Do you recall his name? Would you have for him—perhaps—some forwarding address?
I’m afraid that’s not at all my jurisdiction, the clerk said. You would have to contact the bureau, I suppose. With that, the light that had burned briefl
y in the clerk’s eyes flickered, and went out.
Sutton telephoned the bureau, asking directly for the name and address of whatever person was responsible for reentering, year after year, Arthur Sinclair’s name into the Missing Persons file.
She did not meet with any luck.
It’s just, you see—she lied—I have some pertinent information, which I am sure would be quite useful, if—
This did not get her much further.
I’m sorry, miss—she was told. That is just simply not our policy. We are not at liberty to deal with these matters case by case. We must, for each, follow a standardized protocol; otherwise, as you must understand, we would put our clients—who put their every trust in us—at great personal risk.
Of course, Sutton said.
Then—nearly giving up: Look, she said. I admit I have no pertinent information about this case—none at all. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is purely a matter of personal importance. But, if …
Here she paused. She did not know how she might continue.
If—what? It was useless.
If I am able— she continued. But then her voice, which had grown thin, broke onto a disconcerted silence.
It is hardly policy, said the voice on the other end of the line, after a moment or two in which neither spoke. I’ll see what I can do.
Two weeks later, Sutton received the name she had anticipated: Douglas Sinclair, and an address of a corps project in Boonsboro, Maryland. On her last day in New York, she posted a letter there—urging Douglas to contact her as soon as he reasonably could. Ashamed, for some reason, to provide him with her own father’s address, she included Louis’s father’s address instead—promising that the letter would be forwarded on.
Three weeks after that, however, it was her own letter that arrived, general delivery, to Athens, Tennessee: unread. A scrawled note on the back indicated that, the project (a thorough reconstruction of the Washington Monument, which had, in more recent years, been allowed to crumble into disrepair) completed, the corps had dispersed, Douglas along with them—leaving behind him no forwarding address.
It was a bitter disappointment. As the fall wore on, a profound loneliness descended over Sutton, at times bordering on despair. The feeling was only accentuated by the vastness that stretched between the deserted towns she and Louis passed through, as they continued to make their way; now into the most windblown and uninhabited reaches of Oklahoma and West Texas.
And by another vastness. That which stretched—increasingly— between herself and Louis. Never once had she breathed a word to him about Douglas or Arthur, and neither had she spoken (except to offer the most basic account) of Alden or her parents. For Louis it was the same: a rare occasion that he talked—if ever he did—about the past. With them, instead, it was always the present: what, of it, they might be able to seize; or—at least for Louis, who had become thoroughly obsessed with F. W. H. Myers and his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death—the distant past. More and more, with the help of Myers, Louis had become convinced that—with the correct attention and time—he might recover all of his past lives. That they might—as simply as from a roll of film—be spun out one day in a long chain, where they had remained, all along, imprinted inside him.
To comfort herself on long drives—or in the evenings, while Louis read or slept—she wrote long letters to Alden in her head. First one way, then another, she described to him the events, as she recalled them now, immediately following his arrest.
For the first time. As best she could: her father’s voice. His calm advice. How “the truth” had sounded to her then. In that room, and from his lips.
Most often, she would defend herself. I did it for you! Or feign innocence: I hardly knew what I was doing, and still don’t; how can we know? On rarer occasions she would berate herself pitilessly for what she had done. How could she not—she would wonder—have pressed her father for some other solution? There must—she’d insist—have been some other way than such a willful abuse of justice—a lie!
But no—she had willingly complied. She had condemned an innocent man to a wrongful fate, without so much as a moment’s hesitation— and for what? She was certain that Alden himself could see (as she could see quite clearly now) that the truth would not have had, for Alden, the same consequences it had had for the other man.
On still rarer occasions she lashed out at the Judge—or at Alden himself. How could they have put her—a child—in such a vile position? How could they have let her carry that burden all these years— alone?
No matter what version of the letter she wrote, however, she always closed it in more or less the same way: Did Alden also—she pressed— find himself troubled by the past? And so piercingly, sometimes, that it no longer seemed like the past at all? Did he ever suspect—as she did— that the past did not ever really disappear? That everything remained, instead: haunting the present, forecasting the future, and rendering every effort, on account of it, utterly futile? Every outcome as inescapable as if it had already arrived?
Finally, she did write. An abbreviated version of the letters she wrote in her head, and something of a compromise between the various directions she had previously taken. She simply confessed. Recounting, as simply as she could, her complicity in the events that had led to Alden’s release—and the arrest of Arthur Sinclair.
In closing, she sketched out, in a few words, what details she had managed to glean as to Arthur’s and Douglas’s present circumstances from the courthouse register, and very briefly inquired if he, like she, found himself troubled by the news.
AN ANSWER WAS A long time in coming, and in that time Sutton regretted bitterly having written at all. It would have been better, she thought— as she had long suspected—just to let the thing go.
Why had she been so bent on preserving the old demons? On dragging them up now, after so long—and not only for herself, now, but for Alden, as well? What possible motive could she have had for doing so? Perhaps, she considered regretfully, instead of a genuine desire to bridge the distance that had grown between them, it had been a desire instead— to punish him, somehow. A way of making sure that Alden, too, would be unable to forget—
Well, what purpose could that serve either of them now? Let alone— she reflected—anyone else? Douglas—or Arthur.
ALDEN’S REPLY CAME —WHEN at last it did—as a great relief. He wrote at length, and far more intimately than she herself had dared. But instead of responding to her confession, or reflecting directly on the news she had shared, he advised her to see the whole thing in an entirely different light. One thing (he reminded her) had, at least—through all of this—become clear. Arthur had been “released.” Why not allow herself to be?
At no point did Alden mention that he had in fact been aware of everything to which Sutton had recently confessed. He wrote only: The world and its workings are much vaster than any of us can even begin to imagine. Only: Though we may be doomed to read things always and only according to our own, very limited point of views, that does not make the singularity of that perspective any more true. He himself (he told Sutton) was beginning, at least, to understand things this way—ever since the death of his dear friend Emmett Henderson, who had lost his life fighting for the Spanish Republic just that past spring.
It was Emmett who had urged him, Alden wrote—just shortly before his own untimely end—that one played, even within the context of one’s own life, only a limited role. To imagine it otherwise, Emmett had argued, was an error both in judgment and scale. And (contrary to what it might seem at the outset) to truly understand that this was so, and act accordingly, was an exacting—if not downright impossible— task; far more difficult than any pre-Copernican formulation: each man for himself and at the center of all things. It was only—counseled the doomed Emmett Henderson—by releasing oneself from what could only be the most illusory sense of an ultimate claim over one’s own life, down to its smallest and most insignificant thought or deed (a c
ompulsion, he’d observed wryly, that—in our present day culture— had become downright pathological), that one might actually begin to understand one’s place in the world. And become, therefore, more rather than less capable of working toward some greater good.
He himself understood, of course (Alden continued), how the feelings Sutton mentioned arose. He himself had at one time—not so long before, and as mad as it sounds!—been convinced that in some small way he had even become Arthur Sinclair, so deeply and earnestly had he taken him, and his fate—unknown as it was—into his heart. The audacity of this idea now simply astounded him. What a relief (Alden wrote), more than a relief, to be—finally—released from that delusion! To be just—what luck—himself again!
AFTER THAT, ALDEN AND Sutton kept up a vigorous correspondence. Sutton writing long descriptions of the towns they passed through— Waco, Shreveport, Vicksburg, Jackson—and the landscape, which, even as they left the desert behind and drove deep into the South, seemed to become (in accordance with her diminishing faith in her ability to press from, or against it, any “reality” at all) only emptier by the day. Alden returning—at her request—brief comic sketches of his life in Paris, and the people (mostly Americans, she was disappointed to learn!) he knew there. And, from time to time, a scrap of an almost indecipherable poem, which, in her next letter, she would ask him to parse (a request he could be counted on to ignore or refuse).
Still. And despite her relief that the past, in having at last been spoken, had become less the impassable object it had once been between them— and Alden’s encouragement to leave it, simply and finally, behind—Sutton continued to expect, at every turn, around every bend, if not Douglas or Arthur Sinclair to actually appear, then … something. A hat, perhaps, she thought to herself sometimes—just to be cruel. The one distinguishing feature of either man she could, with any sort of certainty, recall.
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Quartet for the End of Time Page 28
