‘It’s not something a McVie would do. I’m much more worried about McVie’s parents. If they see me on TV, they’ll think I’m saying their son’s death was pointless.’
‘But you’re saying the opposite. You’re doing this for McVie’s little brothers so they won’t be shipped off to be killed.’
‘I’m not sure they’ll see it that way.’
‘So what are you saying? You don’t think this war should stop?’
‘I do want it to stop. The McVies want it to stop. They’re just not comfortable with this sort of protest and nor am I.’
‘It’s this sort of protest that is turning the tide of public opinion. This will get us out of Vietnam.’
‘I suppose you’re right. I suppose I should be there.’
‘So I’ll meet you on the Common then, before the march?’
‘Yes. I suppose.’ Ti-Loup sounded moodily uncertain. ‘I hope the McVies don’t see me on TV.’
‘So wear sunglasses and a baseball cap. Okay?’
‘I suppose. Okay. I’ll meet you there.’
There was a seafood hole-in-the-wall near St Ann’s where they met after Friday-evening mass.
‘You didn’t show up,’ Cap accused. ‘You missed a historical moment in Fenway Park. You missed Pete Seeger. You missed Yossarian and Catch-22 and Alan Arkin. You missed Gene McCarthy. You missed something extraordinary. You never intended to march.’
‘I didn’t know if I would or if I wouldn’t,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘At the last minute, I couldn’t.’
A platter of pan-fried fish arrived and they ate in silence. ‘Someone’s offered me a ride down to New York this weekend,’ Cap ventured. ‘I want to see the Goldbergs and your mother. I miss them. I’ll stay with the Goldbergs.’
‘Is your ride with Cabot?’
‘No, it’s not. Simon’s as allergic to marching with the rabble as you are. Cabots don’t join street protests any more than Vanderbilts do, as you very well know.’
‘So who is giving you a ride?’
‘No one who matters. Just someone planning to join the anti-war sit-in in Central Park. I’m going because this way I get a free ride and I want to see the Goldbergs and ma marraine.’
‘What are you planning to tell my mother?’
‘I’ll tell her nothing that will hurt her and nothing that will even remotely betray any confidence of yours.’
15.
The fall of 1968 was all in a rush with the richness of red and gold and new workloads. Vanderbilt had a heavy teaching schedule as an adjunct, four courses at three different institutions: one undergraduate course at Harvard, two at Boston College, one at Regis, the latter two made possible by Brother Damian. Adjuncts are the serfs of the academic world and Vanderbilt was on subsistence-level pay. He spent his waking hours either in front of a class or travelling from one institution to another. He introduced himself to his students as Patrick McVie, though his pay cheques came under his legal name. Since college administrations pay about as much attention to adjuncts as to ants, no one noticed the difference. On Saturdays, he worked as a butcher.
Lilith Jardine took a full-time position at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, also at an income level that was excessively modest. She put in ten extra hours per week as an unpaid intern at the Fogg because it was a pleasure she could not bear to give up.
The Cabots invited both Lilith and Vanderbilt for Christmas dinner. Vanderbilt had already accepted an invitation from the McVies, who indicated that Lilith was also welcome.
‘I would feel like an intruder,’ she said. ‘I only met McVie once and you are all still in mourning. I just think I’d make them uncomfortable.’
‘So,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘You don’t want to spend Christmas with me.’
‘You know I want to spend Christmas with you. This would be simple if we went to the Cabots.’
‘I can’t do that. You could turn the Cabots down.’
‘I can’t do that without an explanation they would understand. And I can’t leave your mother alone. She’s invited me too. So what I’ve decided is this: I’ll come to Christmas Eve mass at St Ann’s with you, then I’ll take the overnight Greyhound to Manhattan. I’ll sleep on the bus and get there in time to have Christmas dinner with your mother. That’s something the Cabots will understand.’
‘Melusine!’ the countess said. ‘What a joy it is to see you again.’
‘Ma marraine.’ The two women embraced in formal French style, three times, though lips really touched cheeks. Really touched. They held each other.
‘I am not weeping,’ the countess said, wiping her cheeks. ‘I have an allergic reaction to the dust in the heating ducts. We will have a proper French Christmas. Foie gras and sauterne. Christmas simply isn’t Christmas without foie gras. Even when the Germans were in the chateau, at Christmas we had foie –’ There was a long pause.
Cap said carefully: ‘There are rituals that transcend even wartime.’
‘You don’t forgive me,’ the countess said.
‘I am not in any position to judge. My father said there was nothing to forgive, and he was in a position to judge.’
‘He did not know about the foie gras.’ The countess and Cap had torn the baguette into chunks and were busily coating the freshly baked bread with goose liver. ‘I can’t eat this,’ the countess said suddenly. ‘I served foie gras to SS officers when they were occupying France. How could I?’
‘It was wartime. Everyone did what they had to do to survive.’
‘Not your father.’
‘No. Not my father. I hope I have his courage but I’m not sure I do.’
‘I’m willing to wager that you do. I can’t eat this.’
‘Me neither. We could give it to the doorman.’
‘Yes. Call him. Tell me, do you see my son ever?’
‘I went to midnight mass with him last night. He had your rosary – the pearls and the jade – in his pocket. I watched him pass the beads through his fingers.’
‘He goes to mass?’
‘Every week.’
‘Then he is in God’s hands. That is enough.’
16.
There were two days in 1969 that Cap was forever after to think of as the Days of Extreme and Catastrophic Weather. One was in late January, mid-winter, the day of the blizzard; the other was in June, high summer, hurricane season, a day of torrential rain and gale-force winds.
On the day of the blizzard there were radio alerts throughout Cambridge and Boston. All places of business were dismissing employees early. All classes were cancelled. The ploughs were out, but most roads except for the Massachusetts Turnpike were close to impassable. Taxis and cars were buried under snow drifts and tow trucks were unable to reach them. Some subway lines were still running but all trains were delayed. Anyone who had cross-country skis, snowshoes, sleds or toboggans used them on the streets. Temporary shelters were being set up in churches and schools. Power was out in huge swathes of the city and many phone lines were down, and yet Cap’s phone rang in her office at the museum.
‘I’m still on campus at Harvard,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘My class has been cancelled. Can you get home?’
‘The Green Line’s not running,’ Cap said. ‘But I’m planning to walk to Park Street and take the Red Line from there. I’ve heard it’s still running.’
‘In that case, I’ll wait for you at Harvard Square. Bottom of the subway stairs.’
‘It’s going to take me a while to get there.’
‘I’ll wait. I’ve got something important to tell you.’
This was the way Cap remembered it. When they came above ground at the subway stop in Harvard Square, all the traffic was stalled. The whole world seemed astonishingly silent below its thick blanket of white. The snow in Harvard Yard was almost up to their knees. They pushed through it and their boots made a kind of surf with white powder rising in graceful arcs on each side like cresting waves. Cap laughed. ‘Sort of like crossing the White Sea, not the Red,’ she said. ‘T
he Parting of the Snowy Swell. Poussin painted the other one, the Israelites and the Egyptians, but I don’t know what he’d do with all this white.’
‘I’ve enlisted,’ Ti-Loup announced abruptly. ‘Infantry. I leave for basic training at Fort Bragg next week.’
It could have been the blowing snow. It could have been the teacup of the Yard, always an echo chamber with its red-brick buildings huddling close and hovering like anxious parents. It could have been an auditory and optical illusion that Memorial Church sighed and inclined its spire in shock and sorrow. For whatever reason, Cap was snow-blind and snow-deaf. She could not see Ti-Loup. All she heard was a muffled reverberation, not intelligible.
‘I couldn’t hear you,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
There was another day, the day of the exchanges, not marked in any calendar or diary but occurring somewhere between the two extreme-weather days. This was the day of White Magic, the day of relics and talismanic objects, the day when the anguished know they have reached the end of the line, the day they accept sorcery as the last best hope even as they are incapable of belief. This day replayed itself so endlessly and in so many surreal forms in dreams and nightmares that Cap was never quite certain where it had taken place. She thought it probably took place in Harvard Square or in Harvard Yard, but it may have taken place at St Ann’s.
‘Have you told your mother?’ Cap asked.
‘No. I don’t intend to. You have my permission to tell her only after I’m shipped to Vietnam.’
‘This is senseless,’ Cap said. ‘This is utterly senseless. How is this going to help the McVies? If you’re killed, it will be just one more weight for them to bear.’
‘It will prove to them that they’re not alone,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘It will comfort them. Their son had a friend who was willing to die for him.’
Cap found herself pummelling his chest. ‘What about me?’ she demanded. ‘Who’s going to comfort me?’
‘I’m sure Cabot will step into the breach.’
‘How dare you! How dare you! This is a stupid kind of suicide, completely useless. You want to get yourself killed. You do, don’t you? Will that bring back McVie or Ti-Christophe?’
‘Their blood won’t be on my hands. I can’t live with their blood on my hands.’
Cap pounded his chest again. ‘You fucking narcissist! You want your blood on my hands, on McVie’s parents’ hands. If you’re killed or wounded, I’ll never forgive you. And if you live I’ll never speak to you again.’
They must have gone back to Cap’s studio apartment for ongoing battle and drinks because she did remember yanking open the drawer of her dresser with such force that it smashed its brake mouldings and crashed to the floor. There was a shimmery spill of trinkets and photographs, among them the rosary of lapis lazuli beads on a silver thread. Cap threw the beads at Ti-Loup. ‘Throttle yourself with these,’ she said icily. ‘They might keep you alive, but if they do, I still won’t ever speak to you again, you selfish self-preoccupied self-destructive blue-boy who wets himself.’
In the hollow aftermath of her curse, she could not stop trembling. Ti-Loup wrapped the rosary around his wrist and stood looking out the window.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Cap said in a whisper.
‘You know what will keep me safe?’ Ti-Loup said. ‘These will.’ He reached under his shirt and pulled up a ball chain with two dog tags attached. ‘And if they don’t, they’ll make sense of what I’m doing. McVie’s parents had copies of his tags made from the one the military sent back. You know, they leave one tag on the body for identification and send the other back to the family. I promised them that this time, if both sets of tags – his and mine – don’t come back, then at least they will know … they will know … they will understand that his death has been honoured.’ And then Ti-Loup reached into a pocket. He extracted a delicate tracery of pearls and jade. He did not throw the rosary at Cap. He pulled her angry hands towards him and cupped them and spilled the beads into them. ‘Keep these in memory of me,’ he said.
In the eyes of the military, Cap had no standing as next of kin, and on the day of notification, in hurricane season, most of the power lines and phone lines along the entire east coast were down. Flooding was widespread. Bridges were swept away.
Even so, even though the phone call from the countess did not reach her until two days later, Cap knew the moment when it happened. She was in the courtyard of the Fogg and nobody else was in sight but she felt a blow on the back of her head. She lurched forward. She managed to steady herself. She knew. Her legs would not hold. She huddled down on the slate courtyard slabs, her back against the stone wall.
The Ice Age had already set in.
‘You’re shivering,’ someone said. ‘You have a fever.’
Someone brought a shawl and covered her. Mrs Cabot was called and arrived with a limousine. Certain things Cap remembered: the beautiful Cabot bedroom on Commonwealth Avenue; Simon sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her hand; Mrs Cabot arranging a month’s leave from the museum; McVie’s mother visiting and weeping.
She remembered the phone conversation with the countess. ‘Melusine,’ the countess said, but then could not speak.
‘I already know, ma marraine. I already know. I don’t have any details, but I know.’
‘A letter was delivered,’ the countess said, or tried to say. ‘Hand-delivered. Two officers.’
‘Show me when I get there,’ Cap said. ‘I’m not in great shape either, but as soon as I’m able, I’ll come back to New York.’
She remembered that first she made a decision to return to work and to return to her own apartment but found she could not sleep there. The pressure of emptiness was too great, the absence too dark a presence. She felt crowded and jostled. Memories flew up like starlings from whatever she touched.
Perhaps she managed a few more weeks at the museum. Those weeks remained foggy. Halfway through a task she would be unable to remember why she was doing it. She decided to return to New York, and the Goldbergs came for her and tended her in their apartment for days – maybe for weeks? She was not sure for how long. Mostly she sat in the tranquil courtyard of their building except for when, daily, she visited the penthouse on Fifth Avenue, next building but one to East 72nd.
The doorman shook his head sadly. ‘The countess never leaves the building,’ he said. ‘I’ll call the housekeeper and let her know you are on your way up.’
The countess was wearing black. She seemed smaller each day. Our Lady of Sorrows, Cap thought. Two centuries back, she had been painted by Philippe de Champaigne, a mother in mourning who had endured for years the mockery of the court, who had waited too long for the son that history snatched from her. The countess held in her hands and on her lap a letter which she would not let go. It was embossed and on ivory parchment. Missing in Action, it said.
BOOK V
DAYBORO
1.
During an Ice Age, life forms do continue to exist, though they mutate. They adapt. They become something other than what they once were. If they don’t adapt, they die – they die out – and mass extinctions occur. The evidence for expunged forms of primordial life is known from fossils in Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, as well as in rock formations that were once part of the ocean floor. Trilobites, for instance, the first marine arthropods, more or less had the planet to themselves in the Early Cambrian period, many millions of years ago, but were utterly wiped out, effaced, in the Permian period, first of the Ice Ages, also millions of years ago. Yet the exoskeletal remains of trilobites are everywhere, everywhere, found by the hundreds, by the thousands, found by palaeontologists with rock hammers and found by children clambering over rocky shores.
During the Pleistocene Era, when the last great Ice Age gouged its savage glacial Genghis-Khan take-no-prisoners invasion of lush temperate regions, the dinosaurs and the woolly mammoths were extinguished, but more modest life forms survived. They adapted. They changed in appearance and habitat and h
abit, but they survived.
So it had been with the Goldbergs, who survived tectonic upheaval and a cataclysm that was a hair’s-breadth away from mass extinction.
So it was with Lilith Jardine, who survived displacement and erasure of kin.
After Ti-Loup’s vanishing in Vietnam, after the Cabots and Simon had sustained her for the first week, she had returned to her own apartment and folded herself into pupal form, compact, minimalist, eclipsed. She had pleated her arms and legs inside the cocoon of her blankets. Mrs Cabot had arranged her unpaid leave from the museum. She unplugged her phone. She did not collect mail from her box in the lobby. She did not open her door. She went into a dormant phase. When she ate, which was infrequently and sparely, she worked her way through the canned food stored in her pantry. She drank water.
And then, perhaps because all the canned food was gone, perhaps because September branches were tapping against her window and the brilliant reds and golds sent a signal, sent some sort of quickening current through her veins, then her body emerged from its chrysalis. She crawled out of her bedroom. She called the Cabots, she accepted their dinner invitation, she attended a concert with Simon. She called the Goldbergs, she accepted an invitation to stay with them until she found a Manhattan apartment of her own. She moved back to New York. She obtained a position at Sotheby’s – in Appraisals and Valuations – working by day and taking MA courses by night, increasing her expertise in the painting and furniture of the French baroque. She read voraciously. She left no spaces in her waking day for the intrusion of non-work-related thought.
Her training and duties involved, first and foremost, verification of the authenticity of a work. She became a detective. She developed an instinct for the subtle cues and clues to forgeries and erroneous attributions, though she also learned that experts can be brilliantly fooled. She was trained to provide fair-market assessments for collectors, for buyers and sellers. She calculated tax write-offs for charitable donations to museums and insurance valuations for loans or thefts. She discovered that a huge part of the global traffic in art, even the legal part, was secret. Sotheby’s (and Bonhams and Christie’s) were required to be and were lavishly rewarded for being, in a sense, high-class pimps for connoisseurs and collectors. Their task was to connect sellers who wished to sell anonymously with private buyers who wanted their acquisitions kept untracked. The paintings and antiques so traded never appeared in catalogues or auction lots, and it was rare for sellers actually to meet the buyers, but when Lilith was the go-between, she did see the art that changed hands.
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