The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘It’s just that – I couldn’t see – the angle – where it was taken from.’

  She glanced down at it. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  She refolded her arms and then unfolded them and took a cigarette from a pack on a bench behind her, and a lighter from her pocket. Her hands were slim; her father’s hands. She lit the cigarette and blew smoke away from me.

  ‘What?’ She gave an enquiring smile. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Did you take it?’

  ‘The photo? Yeah.’

  ‘I was looking for the spot – where it might have been taken from.’ I could feel myself beginning to repeat words, not able to form a question.

  ‘Is this part of your mission or whatever it is? Tracing Ingrid’s last steps?’ She wasn’t smiling now. ‘I took the photo. It was in the summer sometime. Ingrid loved the Promenade. She loved the view you get of the city from there. She liked to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. And there was a place over there where she liked to get muffins.’ She drew on her cigarette. ‘I don’t know. Those muffins never seemed that special to me. Anyway.’

  She glanced down at the photo again and for a second I thought she was going to take it from my hand. I could sense that she regretted having agreed to lend it to me.

  ‘The towers aren’t there,’ I said. ‘In the photo.’

  ‘It’s the angle. I’m telling you, I took the photo.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. That’s why I went down there. To see.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should check again. Or maybe you should just get a life.’

  The ash had burnt down to a long, curving cinder at the end of her cigarette. Her voice was softer when she spoke again. ‘Sorry. You’re dealing with this in your own way, I can tell. But it’s kind of upsetting for me to talk about. Do you mind if we change the subject?’

  ‘Sure – sure,’ I said.

  She stepped over to the sink and let the ash fall into it. ‘I know what it’s like when you’re feeling that sad,’ she said. ‘Nothing makes sense.’ Her face was turned in profile, mouth set, and I had a sudden sense of her grief. She had never really known her own mother, and now Ingrid was gone too.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fleur.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  At that point I badly wanted to bury all my doubts about the photograph. Coming here to question Fleur seemed to me then like a pointless and cruel thing to do. She went over to where the lights were waiting and picked up a video camera from a shelf, inspecting it. Her friends looked at me with suspicion.

  Fleur looked over at me. ‘Stay if you like,’ she said, neutral, conciliatory. ‘I could do with a hand.’

  ‘Well, OK.’ I hung up my coat and bag on a peg near the door, next to a dozen other pegs all hung with jackets and coats and bags.

  ‘We’re just playing around with the lighting today,’ she said. ‘Seeing how it looks with the different dolls, how the new set looks.’

  The lights were heavy. I dragged one over to a place on the floor that she marked with chalk.

  ‘Good.’ She flicked a switch and the set flooded with light.

  I stayed for an hour or so, watching as Fleur and the boy and girl, Eric and Erika, stood around and posed the dolls in various combinations and positions. Fleur took still photographs and some video. There were dolls I hadn’t seen last time, a couple of Kens, one naked with a suit painted onto his body, and some new girl dolls. Halfway through, Fleur pulled out a robot from a box. It was about the height of the dolls. She wound it up and watched it trudge across the floor, crouching down to see it move. Its little motor whirred, face a mechanical blank. It came to rest after knocking over a Sindy in a minidress. Fleur picked her up and stood her with the other dolls. She sat the robot down on the edge of a chair near the set. Seated there with its legs bent at the knees, expectant somehow, it seemed more pathetically lifelike than the dolls. Fleur stood, thinking. ‘Not sure yet how the robot fits in,’ she said. ‘Costuming is an issue.’

  It was turning to evening outside when I made to leave, and when Fleur switched off the big lights the loft was dark except for one fluorescent tube that buzzed fitfully over the kitchen sink. She turned on some lamps.

  ‘OK, Julia?’ she asked, eyes assessing me.

  ‘I’m good. See you soon,’ I said. I felt her gaze follow me out the door.

  I went back to the Promenade the next morning, which broke hazy and cold like the day before. This time felt different, knowing something about Ingrid’s relationship to the place. On my way from the subway I passed at least seven places that sold muffins and stopped at the last one at the end of the street. I bought a coffee and a blueberry muffin, taking a guess.

  The photograph was in my bag. I sat on a bench near where I had been the previous day, and took out the book it had been tucked inside. I made it through several chapters and they mostly made sense, although there seemed to be a vital piece of information earlier in the story that I’d forgotten. Boats passed across the water, and the expressway under the walkway roared. A sombre couple stopped close by and took photos of one another, unsmiling, with the city in the background, and walked on.

  The muffin was average. I looked over at the skyline. A helicopter flew noisily overhead. It was difficult to conjure up an image of Ingrid here with Fleur. I’d never seen them together, and I tried to imagine their trips here, to this place. The bricks beneath my feet were a pattern that looked like honeycomb. I walked down to the end of the Promenade and around through to the entrance to the pathway over the Brooklyn Bridge. I had done this walk once already, in the last days before I had left the city my first time, years ago. The great blue arches of the bridge framed the buildings, midtown skyscrapers glittering against the sky. That day had been hot, the tail end of summer, the bridge and the streets smelling of burning bitumen and garbage.

  As I walked I had the feeling of going against a current, tracing steps facing the wrong way. Halfway across I turned and looked back at Brooklyn, the railings and pathway and trees of the Promenade, the mansions with their windows looking out to the city. The glint of a blonde-haired head against a red coat made me catch my breath; it was only a small girl, leaning against the Promenade railing, a woman standing next to her who could have been her mother. The girl stretched her elbows along the rail, chin resting on her hands. People pushed past me. The bridge was crowded. Ingrid’s absence had never felt so close to complete. Was it because there was no body to be found, I wondered, that Ralph was driven, and now I was too, to know more about the life? It would have been different if I had been able to visit a gravestone or look at an urn filled with ash. But her ashes had been scattered here, in a way; I remembered seeing images of the plume of smoke and burnt debris that arched through the sky after the towers had fallen, to disperse in the air and land, some of it, in Brooklyn. The only kind of grave to be visited was that hole in the ground downtown. I kept walking, over the bridge to the city, and turned away from that direction as soon as I could.

  Back at the apartment it was still cold. I was thinking about taking the sheets off Matt’s bed and putting them on mine when I saw the laundry basket on his floor, just behind the door, clean sheets folded on top. I took them into my room and sat on the bed. Tiredness overcame me, the sickly pull of jet lag, and I lay down.

  When I woke, hours later, it was night and I could hear Matt in the kitchen, humming, much like it had been the first time I visited. He put his arms around me in a half-embrace when I came into the kitchen, a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.

  He poured me some wine and we talked. He seemed tense and preoccupied, half-listening, drinking fast. As he finished his glass he looked at his watch. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Have fun.’

  I had no idea what time it was. I turned on the television. Friends was on again, the sound down low. Limbo would be like this, I thought, or hell in some version of it. Another episode followed, and another. I woke up again on the unmade bed. It seemed
to be sometime in the afternoon; it was day anyway.

  The birdcage was still there on the terrace and I walked out in my socks. Today was warmer, less chill in the air. The bells tinkled gently. I pushed my fingers through the bars but couldn’t reach the little swings.

  Matt joined me, a cup of coffee in each hand. He gave me one and we stood leaning against the ledge.

  ‘Work’s busy,’ he said, frowning out into the distance. ‘Really complicated pieces going up this week and the artist keeps coming in and telling us to rehang it, rearrange it, and then the curator comes in and tells us to put it back. They’re heavy pieces. It’s a shit.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about getting a job myself pretty soon,’ I said. I’d taken this second trip without much thought about how to afford it; the prior weeks in the city had come close to exhausting my savings.

  ‘Really?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Well …’ I backtracked. ‘I’m not really sure how long I’m staying this time. So I don’t know. Maybe.’

  He peered at me, scrutinising for a moment. ‘One of these artists, the one we’re showing next, he might be needing a new assistant. The one he has now is leaving.’

  ‘Why?’

  He chewed his lip and gave a half-shrug.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘I mean, thanks, let me know.’

  He looked at me, frowning. ‘This has all been kind of hard on you, hasn’t it?’ He put one arm around me. ‘I hope you get some closure soon,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what they call it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I said. ‘That’s what they call it.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Back inside the room I looked through my suitcase, the jumble of papers packed inside the pocket in the top. I pulled out a set of stapled pages: a graduate student directory for the Classics department that I had taken from Jones’s desk one afternoon. Ingrid’s address was still there, her phone number and email. I looked through until I found Trinh’s name.

  24.

  Trinh’s house was an old four-storey brownstone that had been long converted into apartments. I climbed the stoop and pressed the buzzer. Her voice came out through the black plastic grille of the speaker. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Julia.’

  I waited for two seconds, three, four, five, and then the door vibrated as the lock buzzed open. Her apartment was on the top floor. The stairwell echoed with my steps, a hollow sound. She pulled back the door, a heavy rectangle of steel, and held it half-open for a second, looking at me, and then stood back to let me in. Her face was pale. One of her eyes was brown, the other plastic blue. She saw me looking from one to the other.

  ‘I was in the middle of taking out my contacts,’ she said. ‘So, you’re back. Sit down.’ She showed me to a table in a room that was both kitchen and living room, and I sat down. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’ She was wearing a long white T-shirt, and bare feet with toenails painted silver. A stylised vine with heart-shaped leaves snaked around one leg.

  I looked at the black kettle sitting on the stove across from me and wished for tea. Matchstick blinds hung in the window, half-closed. An unfinished game of mahjong was laid out on the table next to a black-covered Greek lexicon. There was a vase with stems of purple freesias in it on a bookcase over on the far wall, next to a sofa. Otherwise every surface was clear. A painted metal radiator on the wall behind me clanked softly and pushed out heat.

  Trinh came back with both eyes brown, wearing wire-framed glasses and a stretchy black skirt. In her hands was a large manila envelope. I recognised it from every noir movie I’d ever seen, photographs inside, saying blackmail just like that.

  I hadn’t said anything to her about why I was there. I hadn’t said anything at all.

  ‘It’s nice to see you,’ she said with a smile. Her face looked naked without make-up. I looked down at the envelope, now sitting on the table between us.

  She gave a short sigh. ‘I probably should have given you these when you were here before.’ She rose and took two glasses down from a cupboard, poured us water from a pitcher she took from the fridge. ‘You know, I didn’t think of it until after the first time you came around to the department. And then there was the box, and then I thought about these and I didn’t know what you would want with them in any case.’

  Neither of us drank our cold water.

  ‘Go on, have a look if you like. This is the last thing I have to give you.’ She stood up again and poured her water down the sink, leaving the glass in there. ‘You’re here about Ingrid, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

  I had the same feeling about this envelope as I’d had about the box when Trinh first handed it to me, an aversion to opening it. Trinh picked it up and pulled out some papers – charcoal drawings and small paintings on thick paper, and a few photographs.

  The drawings were not recent – how old, I couldn’t tell. The paper had yellowed. One showed a spindly tree in spare, simple lines, almost abstract. The first painting was familiar: purple and white lines, some of them crosshatched unevenly. The second painting I recognised right away. There were several colours and shapes in it, a blur of pastel layers in one corner, but the biggest shape was striking: a red triangle, crudely painted, off-centre, a white shadow of paint behind it. The paper had warped from the original moisture in the paint.

  ‘Are these old drawings of Fleur’s?’ I asked Trinh.

  She paused. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I looked at the photographs. The first one, too, was familiar. In this one I knew the face immediately that had been half-turned away, just hazily familiar, when I’d seen it in almost the same pose in Grey’s study, photographed in the same room, the same studio. The depth of field was different in this photo from the one on his shelf and I could more clearly see the images tacked up on the wall behind Maeve, and the canvas on its easel. Spindly trees; crude squares; a triangle. She looked straight into the camera in this picture, a level intimacy in her gaze. The streak of grey was there even on this much younger head. She looked to be in her early twenties, if that.

  The angle of the next photograph was different, but it was the same room. There was a deep-set window with thin curtains drawn across it and a low ledge, a window seat. A man sat in the seat, his form made dark by the brightness of the light behind him so that he was almost a silhouette. The way his legs were crossed at the knee and his arms crossed over them, his slimness, a cigarette in one hand, reminded me of Ralph for a moment and my heart contracted. I did know the hands, but they weren’t Ralph’s. The blood seemed to draw away from the surface of my skin and hurry inward, like it did in the cold outdoors.

  Trinh switched on a standing lamp next to us to add to the lights recessed under the kitchen cupboards. Outside, night had fallen. The room felt very silent. She seemed to notice at the same time and turned on a radio that sat on the kitchen counter. The sound of jazz music came out of it, softly, almost atonal. A trumpet, an answering piano.

  I had several questions about the contents of the envelope and I didn’t expect that Trinh would be able to answer many of them, or want to. She sat back in her chair.

  I started with questions that I knew she could answer. ‘When did you get these?’

  She lit a cigarette slowly and exhaled smoke. ‘Sometime before the end of summer last year. I wasn’t seeing much of Ingrid then – she wasn’t around much – I told you that. Anyway, she came over here one day. I was getting ready to go to work.’ She cleared her throat.

  ‘She was kind of agitated. And she’d broken her hand – you remember, you saw the emergency report. The second time. So, she came over, and we sat for a while, and I made some coffee. It seemed kind of strange – she wasn’t in the habit of doing that, you know, dropping over – we used to go out for a drink or whatever, but it wasn’t really a dropping-over kind of friendship. I had to go to work. I think she had almost decided not to, then just before she l
eft she pulled this out of her bag and gave it to me.’

  ‘What did she say about it?’

  Trinh thought for a moment. ‘She said she had some documents that she wanted to keep safe and she wanted me to hang on to them for her for a while. I think she knew how weird it sounded and she was sort of embarrassed.’ She frowned. ‘You know her – you knew, I mean, you knew her – she didn’t lose her cool, you know?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I asked her about getting a safety deposit box at the bank – what was wrong with that idea – and she said she was getting around to doing that. She was kind of vague about it.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a round porcelain ashtray. ‘Look, I know it sounds weird, but I didn’t even look inside the envelope for a while. For a week or two after that – after we had a break-in here, and I remember thinking that it was kind of ironic that she had left these documents here with me and never got around to putting them in her safety deposit box and here we were, getting burgled.

  ‘There wasn’t much here to take – well, I did have a nice stereo, and that went – but besides that nothing was taken – everything messed up. I don’t have a lot of jewellery or anything like that.’ She smiled wryly. ‘What I do have they didn’t want, and they didn’t want my shoes. That would have set me back. Anyway, it was after that happened, just a couple of days, and I was unpacking my bag and the envelope was in there. I must have picked it up with some other folders from my desk here and it sat there in my bag for who knows how long. That’s when I had a look at it.’

  She picked up her packet of cigarettes and put it back down again.

  ‘Ingrid didn’t ask me to open it and I felt kind of bad doing it at all.’

  ‘What did you think about it, when you saw these – what did you think it was all about?’

  ‘I didn’t want to think about it,’ she said flatly. ‘Like I said, I felt bad about looking at it at all. If she had wanted to tell me what it was all about she would have. We weren’t exactly close. It was private.’ She looked at me. ‘Whatever it was – between her and Gil – whatever this is – it was private. We all have our secrets, our issues, things we want to keep private. I get to see a lot of that in my work, the things that people usually keep private. I’m used to just … putting that away, in a way.’