The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  25.

  I walked fast to Richard’s building and pressed the buzzer.

  ‘It’s Julia.’

  ‘Don’t you ever use the phone?’

  Just – let me up.’

  I took the stairs quickly. There were four sets of locks in the door but only one slid back before the door opened. Richard looked me over and put his arm on my shoulder to steer me inside.

  ‘What’s the big hurry?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t even know you were back in New York.’ He held half a sandwich in his hand and was chewing.

  ‘Is that peanut butter?’

  ‘Yes.’ He swallowed. ‘Yes. Do you want one?’

  ‘Please.’ The entrance hallway was cramped and narrow, a low bookshelf against the wall and over it a print of the Eiffel Tower, a black-and-white photograph. ‘Paris,’ I said.

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘That was here when I moved in.’

  I took off my coat and held on to my bag.

  ‘I suppose you’ll want a drink.’

  ‘What do you have?’

  We sat down on the dark green couch together, my

  sandwich on a plate on the coffee table and my bag still on my shoulder and a glass of whisky in my hand. I laid the bag on the couch and drew out the manila envelope and the book with the packet of photographs still stowed in its cover.

  ‘Did you call me the other day?’ Richard asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘You didn’t leave a message.’

  I lifted my shoulders and dropped them again.

  ‘What are you doing back in New York? I mean, it’s good to see you.’

  He was drinking coffee from a black mug. There were papers out on his desk across the room. The desk lamp cast a pool of light on them. He followed my eyes and rose and straightened the papers, placing them back in a white folder. A manual typewriter sat in the corner of the desk, shrouded in a neat grey cover. Looking back to the filing cabinets along the wall, he hesitated, then placed the folder back on the desk and sat down again next to me on the couch.

  There was a plant over on the windowsill next to the desk, an African violet with three purple flowers. I thought about the image on the subway of the two plants trimmed into the shapes of the towers. Richard had brought an apple from the kitchen, a green Granny Smith, and he held it in one hand. He was wearing a black vest of thin wool over a finely striped shirt, his square-rimmed glasses, the whole Clark Kent look.

  ‘Sorry, I should have asked. How did it go in Sydney? How’s your aunt – did you have much to take care of?’

  I sighed. ‘Oh, it was alright. She’ll be OK.’ I thought of my room in Jenny’s house, the light coming through the window and the coolness of the bed that settled quickly into warmth. I wanted to be there. ‘My brother’s taking care of a lot of things. He’s very organised, very together.’

  Richard bit into his apple.

  ‘Have you seen those posters on the subway?’ I asked him. ‘The statements from people after 9-11?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Why was I asking him, I wondered. Was I really going to ask if he thought 36-year-old Maria was left-handed? Was I trying to impress him as a good student? I was getting ready to change the subject when he replied.

  ‘They’re very interesting. I’m fairly sure they are actually authentic.’

  ‘Authentic?’

  ‘They look as though they may have been written by those people, the ones who signed them. Of course they’re too neat to be first drafts, they’re too polished, but they might be a copy by them of something they wrote.’

  He took another bite.

  It seemed obvious now to think that the notes would be fabricated. A range of sentiments and situations, carefully distilled from life, from some kind of record, arranged to reflect the right range of age and ethnic background and gender. Maria’s statement had probably been written by the copy guy from whatever design company had produced them.

  ‘You think so? Why? How do you know?’

  ‘They just seem real. The writing is right, you know, for a person of the age and gender. There’s one by someone called Carl –’

  ‘But what about what they say?’ I interrupted him. ‘The things they say they’ve experienced, what’s in the statements? Do you think they’re describing something that really happened to that person?’

  He paused. ‘Um …’

  It was a hopeless question. The truth of the statements for him was not connected to the content of the words, what they said as words. It was all in the line, the form. Anyone could lie convincingly about themselves in what they said, in the substance of what they wrote. But their writing would always give them away in some sense, dropping unconscious clues. Or that was the idea of graphology as I understood it. To those trained to understand it, writing would always speak the truth, despite itself; the truth that Richard looked for, at least. One layer of it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

  But he had already started to think about it, and explained that it was hard to tell in this case because the notes seemed so carefully revised and neat; it was hard to tell if the sentiments matched the writing because they looked as though they’d been copied out from an earlier version.

  ‘So sentiments can match writing? Can you tell if a person is, say, really sad when they write that they are?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Noah – the person who trained me – said that he could spot honesty or deception in someone’s line, he said it was somewhere in the upstroke, the pressure marks there … I don’t think I can do that though, I’m not that good. The overall shape of the writing reveals tendencies like that but not matched to the specific statement.’

  He stood and took his carefully shaped apple core to the bin in the kitchen. When he came back I turned to the manila envelope and the book.

  ‘I found this at Fleur’s place before I left.’ I pulled the photograph out, of Ingrid on the Promenade, and passed it to him.

  He looked at it. ‘You found it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I found it in a drawer. At that party you were at. I took it.’

  He was still looking at it.

  ‘I wanted –’

  ‘It’s OK, I understand,’ he said, turning it over to look at the blank back, turning it to the picture again. His expression settled into something sad and hard as he looked at Ingrid’s face, and he handed it back to me.

  ‘But look – look at where she is.’ My fingers held one side of the picture, and his the other. He looked.

  ‘Where – oh, is this taken from the Promenade?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  He looked at me, puzzled.

  ‘Richard, the towers aren’t there.’

  ‘It’s the angle.’

  ‘No, I’ve been down there, I went the day I arrived, and the next morning. I can’t see how you could find that angle without having the towers in the shot.’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to judge when you’re not looking through a camera. Maybe it’s taken from somewhere else – the buildings in the background are pretty blurry.’

  ‘Well – I suppose so.’

  We were silent for a while.

  ‘Look, I know as much as anyone that it’s hard to accept. Those stages of grieving – I found out all about those. Had them pointed out to me rather forcefully.’ He smiled, a grimace. ‘Denial. It’s the big one. It’s the most painful one, when it finally goes.’

  ‘I thought you would understand,’ I protested.

  ‘You thought I’d tell you that you were right? That you’re seeing a ghost? In a photograph? Julia, she’s dead.’

  ‘Come down there with me.’

  He sighed. ‘It wouldn’t help.’

  ‘Maybe it would.’

  He looked troubled.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Not a ghost. Alive. I thought you’d want her to be alive.’

  His eyes closed.

  ‘I thought you’d want to figure it out.�
�

  He opened his eyes, studied me, weighing something up. Whatever it was, I could see that it didn’t get fully decided.

  ‘What else have you got there?’

  I handed him the envelope. He pulled out the drawings, the painting, the photographs, and looked through them one by one. His face grew pale. I picked up his cup and took it to the kitchen and poured more coffee into it from the glass jug in the coffee maker. It didn’t smell like anything. I handed it back to him.

  There was a ghost of anger in his face when he met my eyes, but not with me. ‘Did you go to see Grey?’ he asked. ‘How did you get these out of there? Or Maeve – ‘ ‘No. I didn’t get them from there. I didn’t get them from either of those two.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘They’re …’ I wasn’t sure whether to mention Trinh. ‘Ingrid left these with – with a friend. And now I have them. Now they’re with me.’

  ‘Ingrid had these?’ he asked, his eyes a flash of colour.

  I nodded. He drew a deep breath, and then didn’t breathe again for so long that I found myself holding my own breath, waiting for his lungs to start again.

  I decided there was little to risk with him. ‘She left them with Trinh.’

  He lowered his chin in a kind of nod. ‘When?’

  ‘Late summer.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Look, Richard, I don’t know what to do with these things or what to make of them. I’ve been sitting on them for days not knowing what to do.’

  Part of me wanted to leave them with him, the drawings, the painting, the photographs, leave and walk out and go straight to the airport and wait until a plane could take me home. But I knew that if I was going to do that anytime soon I would have done it already.

  He put his hands on his knees, suddenly animated and business-like. ‘OK. Tell me everything. Does Grey know you’re in town? Does he know you have these? Does he know Ingrid took them?’

  ‘I haven’t called Grey but I’ve talked to Fleur – I’ve tried to talk to Fleur. But not since this.’ I remembered Mrs Bee’s words to me earlier – ‘It’s not who you think I mean’ – and the chill went through me again. ‘He probably knows by now that I’m in town if he’s talked to her. But I don’t know why she would tell him.

  ‘And the rest of it – I don’t know, only what Trinh would tell me. She didn’t really want to say very much – I’m not sure how much she even knew. She said Ingrid was obviously stressed out when she gave her the envelope – Trinh didn’t even look in it for weeks.’

  Richard raised his eyebrows.

  ‘OK. Whatever. She says Ingrid didn’t say anything about what was in it or what it was about, where she’d got the pictures, anything. Just that she wanted to keep them safe and was getting around to putting them in a safety deposit box, but she never did.’

  ‘He’d have access to everything, all those places, after she died.’

  ‘I guess so.’ I went through his words. ‘But she didn’t know that she was going to die – it wasn’t like she knew, she was just putting them out of the way, just.’

  This was further than I had made it myself in any kind of straight line of thinking about the pictures. The past few days whenever I felt them coming to the surface of my thoughts I had pushed them right down, not able to bear the image of Ingrid there in Trinh’s kitchen, the thought of her anxiety, which it would have pained her so much to display. It hurt to think about it now.

  ‘How could she have known?’ I asked, knowing as I asked it that there was an answer and I didn’t want to hear it.

  He started to speak. ‘No,’ I said. He stopped.

  We sat there for a while. Whatever it was he had been deciding earlier seemed to be figured out in those moments. He stood and went to the filing cabinets, opened one and went straight to a file at the back of a drawer. He took out something, a Polaroid photograph, and held it out to me. I looked at his face without really seeing it. I didn’t want to look at what was in his hand.

  I remembered the nausea after the phone call on that 12 September – or was it the thirteenth by then – and it rose again in my stomach. Richard’s hand dropped to his side. I looked down. The bruise in the photograph was a bloody purple, its colour made unnatural by the Polaroid film. Next to it and under it the shape of ribs showed through skin. The background of the picture was dark.

  Looking away, my eyes fell on the Polaroid camera itself, high up on a bookshelf next to the desk, folded away, a blue foil packet of film next to it.

  I thought about those stairs in Grey’s apartment, white and sharp as bone. His feet in their black shoes, stepping up quickly ahead of me.

  ‘You look a little green,’ Richard said. ‘Maybe it was a bad idea,’ – he indicated the photograph, holding it in both hands – ‘but I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t even sure if you knew.’

  ‘I knew about the broken hand. Was that part of it too?’

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t say for sure. She never said.’

  I could see only half her face in the photograph; it was turned away, her whole body twisting slightly. One arm pulled her shirt across to show her bruised waist. Her hair was tied back. A greenish blotch spread out from the lower corner of the image as though a finger had pressed too hard while it was developing.

  Richard turned and placed the picture back in the file and closed the drawer.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. I had risen without realising. The room was black around the edges like the photograph. I sat down. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ he ordered.

  ‘No, I’m OK now.’ I straightened up, or tried to, but was seemingly stuck, bent forward at the waist.

  ‘Are you saying he killed her?’ I asked eventually. ‘Or that he was going to kill her?’

  He pressed his lips together. ‘Well, that’s what I thought at first,’ he said, very matter of fact. ‘You can imagine the reception I got with the police.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The city was full of people denying that their friends, their lovers, their wives, had really been killed in the towers. Those posters for people “missing” stayed up all over the place for weeks.’ He took my glass and finished off the whisky that was in it. ‘And there I was saying that this missing woman’s husband had bumped her off.’

  ‘You went to the police.’

  He nodded. ‘I didn’t tell you this before, when you were here before – I’d kind of put it away – it was useless – well, I didn’t want to see you at first because you were a friend of hers and I was doing my best to forget all about it. I’d, uh, filed it away. Closed the drawer.’ He sighed heavily. ‘But I suppose you can hear about it now. You brought these with you after all.’ He cast his eyes briefly to the drawings.

  ‘At the time, you know, I was distraught. I thought I’d lost another friend too – someone who worked in the restaurant in the towers. Turned out he wasn’t at work that day. Anyway. As soon as I heard that Ingrid hadn’t come home that day I thought, he’s finally done it. That July I’d been away in Maine – my family has a house on a lake there. I was with them for a few weeks and I called Ingrid after I got back.’ He took a deep breath again. ‘We talked a little. She agreed to meet me for coffee.’ He passed his hand across his eyes. ‘It was a horrible summer. I went away just a few weeks after I took that,’ – he nodded towards the filing cabinet – ‘and we’d been fighting. We’d had a couple of arguments, I mean.’

  I waited.

  ‘I was trying to talk her into leaving him,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the part I don’t really understand. Why she didn’t.’

  He looked at me. ‘Really? I thought you’d understand, knowing her for so long.’

  I thought about it.

  ‘She couldn’t stand to fail at anything,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t stand to be wrong. She was still playing out this – idea – this idea of the perfect marriage. And she hated being shamed more than anything.’

  I tried to imagine it, and I could, although it made my stomach t
urn. The shame of being a beaten wife, or of admitting it hadn’t worked. Could that be worse than the violence? This image more than any other made her seem so much older than she had been when she left. I remembered how much her face had aged when I’d seen her in Sydney that last time.

  ‘But you took the picture,’ I said. ‘You saw the bruise.’

  ‘But, see, she hadn’t said anything that night. She hadn’t denied it – she’d just hardly said anything, the whole time she was here. I’d tried to get her to go to the hospital, but she wouldn’t go. I was worried that one of her ribs was broken – you saw, did you?’

  I nodded. ‘The bruise looked really bad.’

  ‘Yeah. It was. But she didn’t want to talk, just wanted to stay here, didn’t want to go home. Fleur wasn’t there – she was away somewhere. A friend from school? I don’t know. Maybe that’s why she came here.’ Ingrid and Grey’s apartment wasn’t far from Richard’s, only a short ride in a taxi. ‘She had been here before a few times. We became. friends, I guess you’d say,’ his voice caught, ‘in that first year at Columbia. It was still a surprise, seeing her that night.’ He sighed. ‘She wasn’t crying. But she was really shaken up. It was my idea to take the picture. Evidence, since she didn’t want to go to the hospital and get it looked at. She wanted to take it away with her at first but then she seemed to just forget about it. I suppose she was in shock. Anyway, later, when I tried to talk to her about it over the next couple of weeks, she had this story about falling down the stairs. Literally, falling down the stairs. She wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t say why she had come here. She wanted the picture back.’ He stopped, exasperated with the memory of it.

  ‘It just started to seem like if we wanted to stay friends I had to agree not to talk about it, not to push it.’

  I remembered the visit to New York with Ralph, the silence that had formed then around the topic of Grey. I wondered if Richard had become a friend to Ingrid in the way Ralph had once been – an admirer, a confidant held always at a calculated distance.

  ‘I found that really hard.’ He paused. His elbows rested on his knees, hands together. ‘We didn’t talk while I was in Maine. And when I saw her in the summer, after I’d got back, there was something different. She just refused pointblank to talk about Grey, the relationship, anything to do with it. She was going up to the place on the Hudson every now and again. I pressed it one more time, just before she left – she was going up there again, and I was really worried about what might be happening up there, you know, in the country.’