Ti-Loup made official introductions. ‘This is Lilith Goldberg,’ he said. ‘But don’t be fooled by her name. I don’t want to go into it, but we received our First Communion together in the church of St Gilles in France. I have a photograph to prove it.’
‘So do I,’ Cap said.
She was seated between Ti-Loup and Patrick McVie.
‘So, Lilith,’ Patrick McVie’s father said. ‘I’m confused. My son tells me your brother was a butcher.’
‘A butcher’s apprentice, yes, sir. And an excellent one.’
‘And he taught young Vanderbilt here.’
‘Yes, sir. He did.’
‘And Vanderbilt is damn good. I’ve watched him and I have to admit it. It don’t make sense for some blue-blood aristo who’s French to boot, but he wants to work in my shop.’
‘You’d be lucky to have him, sir.’
‘My opinion too. But I didn’t expect my son to meet a master butcher at Dryden. And I’m damned if I can figure out what you are. Are you Jewish or Catholic?’
‘I was baptised Catholic, sir.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ McVie’s father said.
‘I’ll put you in a taxi,’ Ti-Loup offered.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll take the subway. Let’s walk back to Harvard Square. I’ve got my little folding map and I’ve got the subway system figured out.’
‘Do you have to go back to the Cabots’?’
‘Well, yes. I’m their guest for the weekend. They are so warm and hospitable and they think the world of you.’
‘Tell me, and don’t lie. Did you sleep with Cabot last night?’
‘With Simon? No.’
‘With Simon! Did he ask you to?’
Cap hesitated. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Are you going to sleep with him?’
Cap stared at him. ‘You know, Ti-Loup, you’ve always been your own worst enemy.’
9.
Lilith Goldberg was invited to the Cabots’ for Thanksgiving dinner but she explained – with all due gratitude and thanks – that she was already committed to the Goldbergs. Vanderbilt was invited by both the Cabots and the Goldbergs to be a guest at their festival table but he had already accepted an invitation from the McVies.
At the Goldbergs, Lilith met the adult nieces and nephews of Myriam and Aaron. The two nephews, married, considered themselves Orthodox and lived in Brooklyn. The niece, Naomi, considered herself ex-Orthodox and more-or-less secular though she still kept the High Holy Days. She lived in Manhattan.
‘You’re like our phantom cousin,’ Naomi said. ‘We’ve heard about your mother all our lives. In fact, I work for the Lilith Foundation.’
‘The Lilith Foundation? What’s that?’
‘You mean my aunt hasn’t told you? That’s so Aunt Myriam. The Lilith Foundation paid to bring you here, paid for the legal work, pays for your tuition at NYU. And my job is to keep the torch lit. We have information networks. We gather evidence. We sponsor refugees from wherever in the world there’s a need. It’s all in homage to your mother.’
‘You’ve never told me,’ Lilith accused.
‘It wasn’t about telling,’ Myriam said. ‘It has always been about doing. About simply doing what is right, the way your mother and your father did.’
‘How do you find the people?’
‘There are networks,’ Myriam said. ‘There are safe houses. Exactly the way there were in France during the war. Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, the new African nations, it works the same way. Word of mouth. These are the people you can trust; these are the people you can’t. Word gets out. From survivors, from prisons, from families whose members have disappeared. There are ways to collect evidence and get it out to the press. Buying and selling art is one of those ways. The Lilith Foundation works with other human rights watchdog groups.’
‘I’d like to do that too,’ Lilith said. ‘I’d like to work for the Lilith Foundation.’
‘Your mother would be pleased. Grand Loup too. We make use of our Sotheby’s connection, especially for field workers willing to travel to African states.’
One week after Thanksgiving, Ti-Loup called Cap, distraught. ‘McVie has been drafted,’ he said. ‘He’s being shipped off to Vietnam.’
‘Why is he being drafted?’
‘Because he lost his student deferment. Because he couldn’t afford to go to Harvard. That’s the way the draft works. I can’t bear it.’
‘Do you want me to come up to Boston? I can stay with the Cabots. Simon said I’d be welcome any time.’
‘Oh. Right. Well then, by all means stay with Simon.’
‘Ti-Loup, I’m thinking about us. Shouldn’t we be together with McVie before he’s shipped out?’
‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. But how will you get here?’
‘By Greyhound.’
‘I’ll meet you at the terminal then.’
‘At least,’ McVie said, raising his beer in the dining room above the butcher’s shop, ‘I’ll get my last Christmas on US soil before I leave. Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Never been in the South.’
‘But they’ll let you come back home for Christmas, won’t they?’ his mother asked.
‘I’m not sure. Twenty-four-hour leave, maybe.’
‘You will come back to us,’ his mother said. ‘From Vietnam, I mean. I know it. I will pray the rosary every day, and Mary, Mother of God, will keep you safe.’
‘And when you come back,’ his father said, ‘I will kill the fatted calf and roast it whole.’
‘And while you are gone,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘I will take your place in the butcher’s shop. I’ll work here every weekend.’
Patrick McVie did fly home to Boston for Christmas 1964. Ti-Loup and Cap (who stayed with the Cabots) joined the family for the Somerville celebration.
‘It’s a new recipe,’ Mrs McVie said. ‘I slow-roasted the turkey from midnight to dawn at three hundred and twenty degrees. It’s so tender it’s falling off the bone.’
‘The Viet Cong make tunnels under the rice paddies,’ McVie’s little brother said. ‘They told us about that at school. The tunnels are booby-trapped, so don’t go down there, Pat.’
‘Hey,’ McVie said, tousling his little brother’s hair, ‘even the potato famine couldn’t kill off the Irish. We’re in Boston till kingdom come.’
‘They shot President Kennedy,’ his little brother said.
Before dawn on a Friday in February 1965, Cap was shocked awake in New York by a phone call from Boston. ‘He’s been killed,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘McVie has been killed.’
‘Dear God. Oh, Ti-Loup, I’m so sorry.’
‘Once I finish my freshman year, I’ll move into his room. I’ll work for his father. I’ll drop out of Harvard.’
‘I don’t think he’d want you to do that,’ Cap said.
‘That’s what Brother Damian says. But I’m responsible for two deaths that should never have happened.’
‘You’re not responsible for either of those deaths.’
‘I am. You’re not listening. I’m ashamed of being me. I’ve almost always been ashamed of being me. I have to find a way to atone. I can’t face my nights anymore.’
‘Ti-Loup, I’ll take the Greyhound to Boston tomorrow.’
‘No. Don’t. I can’t bear the thought of you sleeping at the Cabots. I’ll come down. My father’s in the Hamptons. I can stay in the penthouse.’
‘You could stay here, with the Goldbergs. They have a spare room.’
‘No. That won’t work. But I do want to see you. I need to talk.’
‘We can talk all night,’ Cap promised.
10.
Trying to reach the Port Authority bus terminal via the underground walkways from Penn Station was like being caught in a cement-mixer’s drum: the grinding noise, the buffeting, the thumping of other bodies, everyone rushing, everyone impatient, the booming echo chamber of rolling steel in the Penn Station cave. Cap put her hands over her ears to shut out the assault a
nd in those seconds several people and several pieces of baggage pushed into the space ahead of her and she momentarily lost sight of Ti-Loup.
There was a flash of light – probably someone’s camera, probably someone storing a farewell image of someone else – but for a dizzying second Cap was flare-blind and saw the countess, saw an elegant woman in a hazy fluorescent swirl, saw Aéroport de Paris. In vivid technicolour and slow motion she saw Ti-Loup disappearing through sliding glass doors, half turning back to wave as the shutter clicked and the forked jag of the flashbulb moved like lightning.
‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ she said, slightly frantic, weaving between bodies and cases. She raced down the rabbit hole from the train platforms to the bus departure gates. The tunnel kept getting longer. Ti-Loup seemed very far ahead. He was not pausing or turning back and she had to run faster. ‘Sorry, sorry, I’m late, I’m late,’ she told those she bumped into as she passed.
‘It’s not the end of the world if you miss the bus,’ someone called. ‘There’s always the next one.’
She reached for the back of Ti-Loup’s jacket and grabbed it. ‘Are you trying to lose me?’ she gasped, out of breath.
‘Let go of me. I hate this,’ he said vehemently. ‘I hate crowds. I hate goodbyes.’
‘Then let’s not say goodbye. Let’s say next weekend it’ll be my turn. I’ll take the bus and stay with the Cabots.’
‘No!’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘You can’t be serious. Simon doesn’t even live at home anymore.’
‘Simon. So you keep up with where Cabot is living, do you?’
‘Ti-Loup, how can you be like this?’
‘You know Cabot’s mother is matchmaking. You know she’s picked you out.’
‘And you know no one’s ever been able to tell me what to do.’
‘You invade everything. No space of mine is off-limits to you. The chateau. The Cabots. The butcher shop.’
‘Why are you angry with me? What are you so angry about?’
‘About everything. I’m angry about everything. I’m angry that McVie got drafted. I’m angry that he’s dead. I’m angry that Cabots and Vanderbilts never get drafted.’
‘Then you should join the Resistance.’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. McVie’s parents hate all that anti-war stuff but now they’re like boats without a rudder. They don’t know what they think. They’re just stunned and I’m angry that the only thing I can do to help is work in the butcher shop on Saturdays.’
‘That’s not nothing. That will mean a lot to the McVies.’
‘You know,’ Ti-Loup said, following an entirely different thought path, ‘I have trouble believing that people simply cease to exist.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that. I don’t see how that’s possible.’
‘I don’t either,’ Cap said. ‘And they don’t. Papa and Ti-Christophe are always with me.’
‘I can’t tell if McVie’s father wants my help, which he needs, or if he hates having me in the shop because I’m not his son. Sometimes I think he hates me as much as Michel Monsard and his father hated Ti-Christophe and me.’
‘Isn’t it strange how things work out?’ It seemed to Cap that everyone went round and round on treadmills. ‘We’re like stuck records,’ she said. ‘You getting angry because I like being with the Cabots; you cutting up sides of beef the way you did with Ti-Christophe …’ She stopped. ‘The way you did before …’
‘Before my mother did everything she could to butcher me.’
‘Ti-Loup!’
‘Two deaths. That’s what it took.’ He was becoming agitated. He was moving from one foot to the other like a runner waiting for the starting gun. ‘I’m the Grim Reaper. I’m the kiss of death. You should stay away from me and I should stay away from you.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I won’t let you. Not this time. I won’t let you do it again.’
‘They are flying him home in a body bag.’
‘It’s horrible. War is horrible.’
‘I don’t sleep anymore,’ Ti-Loup said. His eyes were not still. He blinked rapidly.
Cap wrapped her arms around him. ‘Ti-Loup.’ She could feel his heart thumping against hers. She willed calmness into him. ‘You can be as angry with me as you want to be. It’s okay. I’ll call you every evening in your dorm.’
‘I’m not in my dorm in the evenings. I work in the library then.’
‘Oh. So then what time suits?’ But Cap’s words were drowned by the racket of buses revving and braking, the surge of passengers embarking and disembarking, the thump and scrape of luggage. Ti-Loup swung himself up into the bus. ‘What time will suit you?’ Cap called.
Ti-Loup either did not hear or affected not to. Already the bus was moving and she could not see him through the dark tinted glass. She tried to keep up as the sleek metal animal leaped out of the parking bay. She was walking fast, swerving for other buses, swerving for people hefting cases. The terminal was an obstacle course. Drivers were yelling at her. She was stumbling through forbidden zones.
At the exit she stood watching and waving until the Greyhound was nothing but a silver smudge against the point where the parallel sides of Eighth Avenue met.
Ti-Loup had reached the vanishing point. Cap felt bereft.
She tried calling several evenings in a row: at suppertime, earlier in the evening, last thing at night. She tried early-morning calls. He never answered. She tried calling the McVies’ number on weekends. Mrs McVie was always warm and gracious. ‘I’ll tell him you called,’ she would say. ‘You know we are all of us having trouble since Pat … since he didn’t come back.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs McVie.’
‘Thank you, dear. We pray for his soul every day. We pray for our own. We pray that we’ll be able to bear it.’
‘And Vanderbilt? Is he okay?’
‘Managing as well as any of us, I think. Which isn’t very well. He asked us to call him Pat because his real name is Gwynne Patrice. He said he always hated the Gwynne, and Patrice would be Patrick in Boston. He was our Pat’s best friend so I do try to call him Patrick, but it’s, you know … it’s not easy. My husband can’t do it.’
If Mr McVie answered Cap’s call, he hung up immediately. He did not do this quietly. Cap felt as though a door had been banged in her face. Sometimes Mr McVie barked: ‘Leave us alone, why don’t you?’
Myriam found Cap silently weeping and fingering her rosary in the inner courtyard of the apartment building on Madison. She put her arm around Cap’s shoulders.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Cap said.
‘Death and loss never make sense, and nor does grief.’
‘But how can he shut out the one person who knows him better than anyone else and the one most wanting to comfort him?’
‘There is no predicting how anyone will be affected,’ Myriam said. ‘No predicting what anyone will do. No predicting how you yourself will act when you feel as though your heart has been ripped out.’
‘My heart has been ripped out. Several times.’
‘Mine too,’ Myriam said. ‘But you find you can go on living.’
As Cap became increasingly worried about Ti-Loup, she immersed herself ever more obsessively in her courses at NYU. This involved many hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It seemed to her that one could never sit long enough in front of a painting. There was always some new and astonishing detail of brushwork or perspective to be observed, though from time to time she would be embarrassed by a security guard politely tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Miss, it’s closing time.’ How could that be? she would wonder. Surely she had barely arrived? For this reason, one of her courses – Painters on Painting – was particularly reassuring, especially Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. I would gladly give ten years of my life, Van Gogh claimed, to be able to sit for fourteen days in front of Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride with barely a crust of dry bread to eat.
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p; Cap understood looking with that kind of intensity, with that kind of insatiable need.
It was a source of torment to her that she herself had no talent for drawing or painting. Her only talent was for looking at paintings, for touching furniture.
‘That is not an insignificant gift,’ Myriam Goldberg reassured. ‘It is the gift of the collector and conservator. If it were not for us, many of the greatest achievements of the greatest artists would be lost or destroyed.’
‘But you paint also,’ Cap pointed out.
‘A minor talent. In watercolour only. My gift for acquiring and conserving is more important. To the collective memory, the collective conscience, the historical eye.’
Cap asked herself how she would paint Ti-Loup if she could paint.
Perhaps as an injured animal being hunted? A wounded deer? An abandoned wolf cub? Un petit loup or un cerf being hounded to death?
A sixteenth-century French painting came always to mind. She had never seen the original, which hung in the National Gallery in London. What she had seen, in one of her lectures, was a slide of this painting, which was called St Gilles and the Hind. She wanted to fly to England and sit in front of the canvas itself. She would certainly do that when she could. The name of the artist was unknown and the date was approximate (early sixteenth century) but it was within the purview of her research field. The label assigned to the painter by art historians was simply the Master of St Gilles.
St Gilles! Was the village named for him? Or had he lived there?
Cap had seen two paintings by the Master of St Gilles in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours but she had not seen St Gilles and the Hind.
She found the slide in the Art History library at NYU and projected it onto the wall of her carrel. She enlarged the image. There on the canvas was the kneeling French king and there in the background was the village of St Gilles, dominated by the Château de Boissy. There, in the middle foreground, near the right edge of the painting, was the rocky mass inside of which the safe house was as hidden and protected as a womb. There was the secret cavern-like entrance beneath the stone bridge. There was St Gilles himself, the spitting image of Grand Loup, cradling the wounded hind, an arrow shot by one of the king’s archers projecting from its quivering flank.
The Claimant Page 39
