‘Ma!’ McVie said, mortified.
‘So,’ McVie’s father said. ‘What’s in this for you, huh? Brownie points? Upper crust slumming it in Somerville? I understand you’re half Catholic, so I guess this’ll be worth a decade off in purgatory, if that still matters.’
‘Dad!’ McVie covered his face with his hands. ‘Is it so difficult to be hospitable to my best friend?’
‘Oh, hospitable!’ McVie’s father said. ‘You lost me already in the big-word department, son. Best friend? That’s a laugh. Use the sense God gave you, why don’t you? If you can’t see when you’re being pinned on his chest as a virtue medal, then you don’t know brisket from rump.’
Vanderbilt decided not to try to explain that he had worked in a butcher’s shop, that he had been taught how to cut up a side of beef, that he did know brisket from rump.
‘Knock it off, Dad,’ McVie said. ‘Can’t you leave this alone? Mom, would you like us to leave?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ McVie’s mother said. ‘Donal, please. Do you have to prove every time that you’re Bog Irish?’ To her son and to Vanderbilt and to the guests who were priests and to the rest of the family, she offered extenuating circumstances. ‘He’s already been into the Bushmills, I’m afraid. It’s Thanksgiving, after all. And we’re in mourning for the president. I hope you’ll cut him some slack.’
‘Mrs McVie,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘he’s behaving better than my father would. I’m not offended.’
‘Your heart’s in the right place,’ offered Brother Damian, the chess-playing schoolteacher from the Marist school.
‘Deo gratias,’ said Father Augustine, the parish priest from St Ann’s. ‘Shall we ask God’s blessing on this family and on this nation and especially on the family of our dearly beloved President Kennedy?’
‘Amen,’ everyone said.
‘If something is troubling you, son,’ Father Augustine murmured to Vanderbilt over the dark turkey thighs and roasted sweet potatoes and stuffing, ‘you could come to confession this weekend.’
‘Thank you, Father. I will think about that.’
‘How long since you have been to confession?’
‘A long time, Father.’
‘Apart from this devastating national sorrow in which we all share, I sense that something further, something beyond that, something far beyond that and far more personal, is troubling you. Is there something?’
‘So many things, Father, I wouldn’t know where to start.’
10.
From January onwards, rafts of college acceptance letters began arriving at Dryden. Vanderbilt and McVie were both accepted at Harvard and they ran an extra few miles in celebration. They ran neck and neck in a kind of unspoken pact, neither ever forging ahead.
‘Harvard!’ McVie kept saying every few miles, between gasps, as though it were an encrypted word he had just pulled from a fortune cookie. It might have been a rune. It might have been a hieroglyph from the Dead Sea scrolls. He was still trying to translate it.
‘Not bad for two misfits,’ Vanderbilt said.
‘Please. You’re not a misfit. You’re with your own tribe. Your father’s on the Board of Trustees.’
‘And my father thinks of me as an embarrassing alien whom he’d like to disown.’
‘The way my father thinks of me,’ McVie said.
‘But we do belong to our own tribe of each other, don’t we?’
‘The misfit tribe?’
‘The book-loving tribe. The lapsed-Catholic tribe, still hooked on the ritual and the magic, still nostalgic, the ones who never touch their rosaries but will never be able to throw them out. The cross-country runners. The chess players. Aren’t we a tribe?’
‘Pathetically small tribe,’ McVie grunted. ‘Not much of a prognosis for survival.’
‘So what? Chess every Sunday when we’re at Harvard?’
‘Chess every Sunday,’ McVie agreed. ‘And how about chess tonight?’
‘Are we going to play to a draw?’
‘No way,’ McVie said. ‘We both play our best. That’s what got us into Harvard, after all. Being best at whatever we tackle is all that we outcasts have.’
They were still playing, illegally, after lights out, at midnight. They hid in the library and played by flashlight. McVie won.
‘We’re going to have to sleep on the floor,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘Between the stacks. The dorms will be locked.’
‘Worth it,’ McVie said.
‘Worth it,’ Vanderbilt agreed. ‘But next game, you are going to lose.’
That same week, another letter arrived by Priority Post. Vanderbilt had to sign for it, which he did automatically before he saw where the letter was from. He had assumed it would be from Harvard, but it was from the Goldbergs in New York. He immediately ran five miles of the cross-country trail, alone, the letter inside his sweatshirt, burning his chest. The trail was two feet deep under powdery snow, fresh fallen, and he kicked up a snow-fog as he ran. The letter smouldered like a radioactive chip.
He got to Latin class late.
‘What the hell?!’ McVie whispered, shocked. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Nothing. I just needed to run, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘Can’t tell you.’
‘You look as though you’ve been hit by a truck.’
‘Feel like it too.’
McVie was alarmed. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’m trying not to see a ghost.’
‘What?’
‘Ignore me. Ignore anything I say. I’m not in a normal state of mind, I’m not responsible for anything I say. Okay, so I’m in purgatory at present and I don’t want to talk about it. Leave me alone, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Thanks.’
Vanderbilt sat in his room and stared at the mountains. He knew the letter would contain bad news. He knew it would be intelligence from St Gilles, about Grand Loup, about Cap, about fallout from the death of Ti-Christophe, about the chateau, about his mother, about any or all of the above. He knew the knowledge would suck him back to a time and a place he could not manage, to other tribal spaces to which he had never, and would never, fully belong. He had spent too many years straddling different worlds – the chateau, the gardener’s cottage, Ti-Christophe’s cutting room – like a man with his feet in separate boats. He had spent too much time climbing out of windows, climbing into windows, trying to remember which voice he should use or which one would come out of his mouth. It was exhausting and dangerous. He felt that he was on the lip of a mudslide and had to grip the arms of his desk chair because the sense of vertigo was so intense.
He did not open the letter. He added it – unopened – to the shoebox where all the other letters were.
Often at night that bottom drawer glowed like a phosphorescent eel. Sometimes it undulated out of its recess and coiled its way through the black room. When it touched his pillow he would wake with a cry and turn on the light and leave it on until morning.
That night – the night of the Priority Post letter from New York – he tossed and turned and could not sleep. The mudslide engulfed him, his feet gave way, he slithered down the slick steps below the stone bridge and passed out. He could hear fighting. He could see corpses strung up in the trees like Chinese lanterns, lit up by their own red blood. Also strung up were sides of beef, forequarters, hindquarters, necks and shanks. All the bodies and parts of bodies were impaled on fat steel hooks that slid back and forth on overhead tracks. Vanderbilt himself was shunted at high speed between the bloody remains of Ti-Christophe and a calf he had known personally as Jacqui Jouet on the chateau farm. He had patted this calf as a newborn. He had held the milk bottle in its guzzling mouth. Jacqui Jouet’s huge mournful eyes reproached him.
All the hooks squealed on their rails and Vanderbilt felt like a shuttlecock being bounced against carcasses and bodies. He could see the ribbed husk of Grand Loup. He could see Cap. He bounced against them and off
them. He covered his eyes. He yanked himself off his hook, losing at least half of his neck, which fountained blood. He ran. He kept running and running until he collapsed. At dawn, he found himself half frozen on the snow-covered grounds in the Dryden woods. He was wrapped in his dormitory quilt.
In the last week of May, both the school and the village of Dryden braced for the annual onslaught. Hundreds of parents, grandparents, siblings and girlfriends were expected. Graduation ceremonies, in elaborate detail, were choreographed. Every inn and Bed and Breakfast in western Massachusetts was booked out. Vanderbilt received word that he was to report to the headmaster’s office.
‘Vanderbilt,’ the headmaster said, ‘needless to say, we are very proud of you. We always expect to send our boys to Harvard or Yale or MIT. Your father will be here for the Board of Trustees dinner. He has sent word that he will meet you on campus on Wednesday at five p.m. for cocktails in the Trustees lounge before the dinner. You may bring a friend. Whom would you like to bring?’
‘McVie, sir.’
‘Ah,’ the headmaster said. There was a long pause. ‘Do you think that’s entirely suitable?’
‘Why would it not be, sir? We are best friends and we have both been accepted into Harvard.’
‘Quite right,’ the headmaster said. ‘Why would it not be?’
Both McVie and Cabot – though the latter was now a senior at MIT – were invited to the Board of Trustees dinner with the headmaster. The parents of Cabot and McVie were also invited. It was an elegant catered affair. Mrs McVie gave Vanderbilt a hug. ‘I’m so nervous,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been to anything so grand.’ She pulled at her dress. ‘I ordered it from the Sears catalogue,’ she said, ‘and it’s the most expensive outfit I’ve ever owned since my wedding dress, but I’m not sure it’s quite right.’
‘Mrs McVie, you look beautiful,’ Vanderbilt assured her. ‘Let me introduce you to Mrs Cabot.’
Mrs Cabot was warm and polite. ‘You must be very proud of your son,’ she said.
‘Yes, I am. Though, to be truthful, his father would have been happier for him to take over the family business.’
‘All fathers want that,’ Mrs Cabot said. ‘It’s natural, isn’t it? My husband wanted my son to teach Classics but my son chose to be a physicist instead. I wonder, do any parents understand their sons?’
‘I’m sure we don’t understand ours,’ Mrs McVie said. ‘We don’t even understand half the words he uses.’
‘It’s the same with us,’ Mrs Cabot sighed. ‘I have no idea what is meant by muons and quarks.’
‘Well, son,’ Vanderbilt’s father said, ‘I’d be happier if you were planning an MBA at Harvard, but hobnobbing with the Cabots is a promising sign. I’ve invited Cabot Junior to stay with us in June.’
‘Actually,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘I was planning to spend the summer in Boston.’
‘Fine, fine. Wherever you want. I’ll mostly be in the Hamptons with Julia. But I expect you to spend June with us in New York. And Cabot Junior will be our guest. He’s got an interview at Columbia. Any objections?’
‘No, sir.’
‘That’s settled then. I’ll take both of you back with me in the limo. And now the Cabots will owe us, you understand? They’ll be indebted. It’s important to know the value of mutual obligations. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It’s simply the way things are done.’
Scrolls and mortarboards in hand, McVie and Vanderbilt decided not to join the nostalgic hordes climbing up to the Rock. They met in the gym where they stripped themselves of the alien plumage of academic gowns and hoods.
‘Let’s run,’ Vanderbilt said.
‘Yes, let’s run. They’ll notice we’ve gone missing, you know.’
‘I doubt it. But so what if they do?’
‘I mean your father will. The headmaster will. My own parents have left already,’ McVie admitted. ‘My mother said people were staring at her dress and her shoes. My father said they could all go fuck off.’
Vanderbilt laughed. ‘I’ll second that.’
‘Got something to tell you,’ McVie said. ‘Don’t get angry.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘I’m not going to Harvard. I’ve sent my letter of non-acceptance.’
‘What?! You can’t do that! Nobody turns down Harvard.’
‘I’ve done it.’
‘So where are you going?’
‘Union Square, Somerville.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Things are tough for my father right now. All the able-bodied men are getting drafted for Vietnam so the cost of labour goes up. He needs help with the family business.’
‘I can help. We can help. You won a full-tuition scholarship, for God’s sake.’
‘Yeah. Sounds good. But we still can’t afford Harvard. Freshman year, you’re not allowed to live off campus, so there’s the room-and-board fee, the cost of textbooks, the athletics fee, the student activities fee. Anyway, I’ve had it up to here with being the grateful leper.’
‘McVie, McVie, don’t do this to me. There’s your future with Harvard and your future without Harvard and there’s an abyss in between. For God’s sake, you’ve been accepted. You can manage this. What about student loans?’
‘They have to be paid back,’ McVie reminded. ‘Not something I can saddle the family with. But we can meet on Sundays for chess, right?’
There was one thing that Vanderbilt did do on the morning of the drive back to New York, following the Dryden graduation. He opened the radioactive bottom drawer of his dresser and he lifted the lid from the radioactive box. He took out Myriam Goldberg’s paintings of Ti-Christophe and Cap, though he left them wrapped in silk. He could not bear to look at them but he could not leave them untended before he put the rest of his possessions in storage over the summer. He could not move into his Harvard dorm until September and he was not going to cart everything back and forth to New York. He put the paintings of Ti-Christophe and Cap, covered in silk, into his duffel bag. He changed his mind several times about the rest of the radioactive box but eventually added it, taped shut, to one of the boxes marked for storage.
‘Hope you don’t mind, Vanderbilt,’ Cabot said as the passengers spaced themselves in the cavernous kid-leather lounge of the limousine. ‘I’ve got this interview and your father offered –’
‘I couldn’t be happier. What’s the interview for?’
‘Columbia. Graduate school. Nuclear physics.’
‘Already? But you don’t graduate from MIT until next year.’
Cabot sighed. ‘Interview process starts this far ahead. It’s exhausting. At least we’ll have a year’s overlap in Boston. You still running cross-country?’
‘Every morning.’
‘I’m down to a couple of days a week. Never enough time. I’m always pulling all-nighters in the labs. But next year we could do some runs together along the Charles. Sunday mornings, say?’
‘Deal,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘But I always assumed you’d stay on at MIT for your doctorate.’
‘Oh, I will if I can. First choice. But it’s not like getting into Dryden because your father’s on the board. I’ve applied to five places, which makes me feel reasonably safe. Plenty of students are applying to ten.’
‘A lot simpler in our day,’ Vanderbilt’s father said.
‘Your father’s a Harvard professor, for God’s sake,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘Won’t that –?’
Cabot laughed. ‘Not anymore. Unless of course we’re talking about the business school.’
‘Anyway, you don’t need your father’s help. You’ll be accepted wherever you’ve applied.’
‘Ah, Vanderbilt,’ Cabot said. ‘You’re so good for my ego. And so naive.’
‘You know what’s fascinating, son, listening to you?’ Vanderbilt’s father commented. ‘You don’t sound like an effeminate Frenchie anymore, or like a New Yorker either. You sound like a Boston Brahmin. You sound exactly like Cabot. In fact, you sound as chopp
y as our recently departed JFK. Which means Dryden was a damn good investment.’
Vanderbilt winced.
‘Tough luck, Vanderbilt,’ Cabot grinned. ‘Didn’t mean to do you that much harm.’
BOOK IV
THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS
1.
The winter of November–December 1963 was a harsh one in the sprawling river system of the Loire and its capillary feeder streams – the Cher, the Indre, the Vienne – all of them flowing west past splendid chateaux and vineyards towards Nantes and St Nazaire and the oyster-crusted pylons of the fishing village of Le Croisic at the tip of its crooked westward-pointing finger of rock. Between Le Croisic and the jagged shoreline of Newfoundland there was nothing but ocean, three thousand miles of it. Sometimes debris – fragments of fishing boats from Nova Scotia – were carried on the Gulf Stream and washed up against the estuarine mouth of the Loire, where they eddied about its sandy banks. Throughout the vineyards that fall, the ground was white with frost every morning. Snow came early and did not melt but lay around like scattered ice-cream mounds. Ponds glazed over with translucent wafers that farmers had to shatter so that sheep and goats and cattle and dogs could drink.
Capucine herself split logs – she was adept with an axe – and stacked the wood in the shed at the side of the gardener’s cottage. She had a canvas log-carrier with wooden handles and could take ten split pieces of firewood into the kitchen at a time. She fed the cast-iron stove every hour. A cassoulet simmered fragrantly in one large pot and chicken broth in another but her prime interest was in keeping the cottage warm. Her father’s shivers came and went with the brief unpredictable violence of thunderstorm squalls. After each funnel of turbulence, he lay exhausted. He slept, or at least his daughter hoped the stillness was sleep, prayed it was sleep, though her own heart turned somersaults every time the shuddering stopped and his eyes closed. His heart would falter then rally again and then falter again. Bundled up in quilts – which he would hurl off when his internal furnace steamed off the chills – he lay in front of the stove on the couch.
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