I was five.
I do not recall the gentleman’s name nor the exact whereabouts of his sea island retreat in the low country just south of Charleston. I suspect he was courting my mother, for I have a dim memory of enduring a long, boring meal on a screened veranda, with the echoes of owls and the grunts of bull gators punctuating our conversations.
This man had probably given up on his chances with her long before the meal finished, for instead of attempting to take my mother for a walk along the beach or indeed tempting her with his expensive telescope, he left her alone on a rocking chair on the veranda and escorted me to a viewing deck on the second story of the house.
I cannot picture the features of his face. But I do recall with clarity the scent of talc on his skin and his full, thick gray beard. The sensation of his fine hairs against my cheek as he leaned to help me look through the eyepiece is an integral part of my memory as is that moment of exhilaration as the view of the moon’s valleys and mountains brought from me a gasp.
He laughed as I reached out—my eye still pressed into the eyepiece—with my fingers to grasp this magnificent apparition.
Because my memory of that first view had such an impact on me, I also remember the few words that we spoke.
“What is it that you see?” he asked.
“The moon,” I said, unwilling to lift my head from the telescope.
“No,” he replied. “The face of God. If you cannot see him in the moon and planets and stars, you will always be blind.”
“Yes,” I said immediately. “I see him.”
In that moment, I lied, afraid that I would lose my eyesight and be robbed of what my optic nerves delivered, so desperate was I to be allowed to continue to marvel at the sight of the moon in a way I did not know possible until then.
What more he spoke, I cannot say, for the next half hour of marvels dominate my memories of that evening.
That night, I saw for the first time the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. Although I didn’t understand the terms or concepts, I saw a speck of distant light become pinpricks of light swirled in the shape of a galaxy.
I was hooked.
By the age of eight, I had my own inexpensive telescope. I could point out all of the major constellations and most of the minor ones. I knew which part of the sky to scan for Mars, and when. The same for Venus.
By the age of ten, I understood the difference between perigee—the point in the orbit that is closest to Earth—and apogee, the point farthest from Earth. It fascinated me to think that the moon, some 250,000 miles away, regularly drifted between Earth and the sun, casting a shadow on us that was only sixty miles across—the umbra—and that the penumbra was a partial shadow four thousand miles wide. I understood occultation observations and gravitational lenses and astronomical units.
Each year I learned more, but with everything I learned reading as much as I could, I never once saw or considered evidence of God.
In fact, through the years into adulthood, what I learned brought me closer and closer to thinking that I had not lied to the old man with the gray whiskers but that he had lied to me on that enchanted evening when I was five. I believed there was nothing to see of God in the moon and the planets and the stars.
But then, there was a lot I did not know.
**
I sat in place in the hospital room, waiting for the moment until Edgar Layton finally blinked his eyes open.
It did not happen.
At least, not while I sat beside his bed.
The door opened.
I looked up.
A woman walked inside the room. She had long, wavy dark hair. She wore loose clothing, browns and blacks. She was perhaps a couple of years younger than I.
She stared at me for a few moments. A strange look of recognition seemed to cross her face. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “What is it you want with my father?”
What I want with your father is to watch his pain as he dies, I resisted the urge to say. What I want is some sort of retribution for all that he took from me.
Instead, I spoke quietly and gave another truth. “I want to ask him about my mother. She ran away from me on the night of July 12, a date I will never forget. I was not quite ten. I believe your father might be able to help me.”
Again, she gave me a strange look. She opened her mouth to say something. She shut it. I guessed she changed her mind.
“My father is near death,” she finally said. “I don’t want him disturbed.”
“I understand that,” I said. “It’s just that—”
“What you want is more important than what he might want? Or what I might want?”
I had nothing to say to that.
“Please go,” she said.
“Is there a place I can contact you if you change your mind?”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“My name is Nick Barrett,” I said. “I’m staying at the inn at Two Meeting Street. If—”
“Good-bye,” she said.
As I departed, I wondered why she was so angry with me. Most people waited until they got to know me better.
Perhaps, I thought, she is a good judge of character.
Chapter 5
The cousin I had last seen passed out drunk against the passenger side of the wrecked Plymouth Valiant worked in a second-floor office suite perched above one of the many third- and fourth-generation law firms that afflicted Broad Street.
This was my third planned destination of the day. I had saved the most enjoyable for last.
I stepped through the main door onto plush carpet to be greeted by the silence of hushed air-conditioning and the questioning stare of, naturally, an attractive secretary. When I walked past her desk to step unannounced into his office, her eyes flared with surprise.
I shut the door behind me and locked it. From outside, she knocked on the door as Pendleton looked up from his desk.
To his credit, his face showed no surprise. But then, he always had been able to put on an impressive front.
Pendleton Barrett sat behind a desk bare of papers and picked up his phone. He hit a button and spoke into the speaker. “Denise, it’s fine. I know him.”
The knocking on the outside of the door ceased.
His office was decorated to an interior designer’s concept of postmodern New York hip. Minimalist furniture, stark and black. Abstract paintings. Flat-screen monitor. Black leather couch in the form of a semicircle.
I studied my cousin.
Pendleton had changed little—his handsome sallowness hardly gone further to seed, his dark suit and red silk tie fitted perfectly to a body that probably indulged in three hours of exercise a day.
I didn’t sit. This wasn’t going to take long.
“Unexpected,” Pendleton said. “I’d say a pleasure, but why bother with the pretense.”
“So that it matches the rest of your life.”
“Oh, my,” Pendleton said, clutching his heart. “You’ve just devastated me.”
He meant that sarcastically; he had no idea it was my intent to accomplish it literally. But, like the night before on the piazza of the deMarionne mansion, I savored the anticipation of my vengeance.
**
One Friday during the summer of my tenth birthday, I had been swimming in the ocean with Pendleton.
“There’s Claire,” Pendleton said. “See, she’s waving at us.”
Both Pendleton and I were dog-paddling in the gray Atlantic, rising and falling with the gentle waves a hundred yards offshore. Only our heads, hair slicked back like seal pups, showed above the water. Pendleton with soft features, aristocratic and verging on effeminate, but rescued by eyes that seemed to know much. Me, square faced and freckled.
Pendleton waved back at Claire, kicking hard with his legs so that his shoulders and upper chest lifted him from the water; I was too shy to respond to her wave of greeting and unsure what to do with the feelings that hit me anytime I saw Claire, who now stood just
past the dunes, where the waves compacted the sand into a wet, smooth base. She wore a navy blue one-piece bathing suit with a frilled skirt, and my heart flared with the crush I had on her. Behind her, rising into view above the dunes, was the Barrett beach house, a rambling two-story wooden structure on stilts to protect it from hurricane waves.
“Race you back,” Pendleton said. “Ready . . . set . . . go!”
Pendleton was eleven, a year older than I, both of us at the ages where a year’s growth makes a tremendous difference in the strength of developing muscle and bone. I was the same height as Pendleton but easily fifteen pounds lighter and had yet to win a race against him—on foot across the beach, on bicycle to the ice cream parlor from the beach house, in the water.
This time, however, the gap between us did not widen. In the past few days since arriving for my annual two-week vacation with his family on Folly Island, I had been experimenting with a way to slip through the water by keeping my arms tighter to my body with each stroke, not losing as much energy to splashing. Now I felt a thrill of efficiency and power as I cut through the waves.
This time, unlike our other races, Claire was watching.
I swam hard, driven with a heroic determination that burned in a wonderful way, my heart ignited by her presence on the beach.
I didn’t even realize I was winning. Not until we reached the final few yards, where the shallowness of the water forced me to my feet for an ungainly run with knees high. I was just ahead when Pendleton reached and yanked at the back of my swimming trunks.
As the trunks slid down, I twisted sideways to escape the mortification of being exposed to Claire. I fell as my legs caught in my trunks. I landed headfirst in the water, scraping my chin against the sand beneath as my head snapped backward on impact. I didn’t lift my head to breathe; my first priority was the swim trunks that were down to my knees. I pulled hard, hoping my bare bottom remained below the surface of the shallow water. Only when my trunks were in place did I roll over and come up gasping.
Pendleton was already on shore, bent over, hands on knees, laughing hard.
It wasn’t the laughter that infuriated me, but the unfairness of Pendleton’s tactics. I dashed out of the water and rammed my shoulder into Pendleton’s stomach. The momentum of my tackle took both of us down. We rolled twice, the points of our shoulders and knees leaving imprints in the wet sand. Pendleton used his superior weight to pin me. Both of us forgot about Claire.
“Stupid jerk!” Pendleton shouted, his face inches above mine. Sand was stuck to Pendleton’s forehead. His eyes were wide with rage. “Say uncle!”
I pushed back. Uselessly. Pendleton straddled my chest, his knees on my upper arms.
“Say uncle!” Pendleton grabbed a handful of sand and rubbed it into my face. “Say uncle!”
I squirmed. Silent. Spitting out sand when Pendleton finally took his hand away.
“Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!” Pendleton screamed. “Say it!”
“Let him go,” Claire said. She was only nine, but even then she had a presence. The striking blue eyes, the cameo symmetry, the blonde hair. “Don’t fight.”
“Not until I hear uncle,” Pendleton said.
“Uncle,” Claire said for me. “Now let him go or I’ll never visit you again.”
Her threat showed that even then, she must have known her power over both of us.
Pendleton rubbed a final handful of sand in my face. “Loser,” Pendleton said. He stood. “Don’t even know who was your own daddy.”
I remained sitting on the sand. Angry. Humiliated. Confused. Didn’t know who was my own daddy?
“You heard me,” Pendleton said, reading my confusion correctly and enjoying it. “They all laugh at you and your mama. ’Cause you’re illegitimate. Your daddy could be anybody in Charleston. Probably some drunk or gambler your mama found in a bar one night. That’s what my mother believes. That’s what my mother tells other people about your mama.”
I got to my feet. I wiped my face with the back of my arm. “My daddy was a war hero.”
“No,” Pendleton said, playing to Claire as audience, showing the single-minded focus on winning that would serve him well as he grew older. “My uncle David was a war hero. And my uncle David married your mother. But my uncle David Barrett wasn’t your daddy.”
I looked at Claire, helpless. “He married my mama . . . ,” I said to her. “I’ve got a photograph of him in unifo—”
“Oh, they were married,” Pendleton said. “But he went to Vietnam. And never came back. You were born a year and a half after he left. Don’t you know anything about the birds and the bees?”
“Pendleton . . . ,” Claire said, warning in her voice.
“Someone’s got to tell him.” Pendleton leered with victory. “Everyone else knows, so he should find out too.”
Claire put a hand on my arm. “Just don’t listen to him.”
That I received Claire’s sympathy infuriated Pendleton more.
“Babies only take nine months,” he said. “My uncle David and your mother were gone from each other too long for my uncle David to be your father.”
News of this magnitude, if true, is enough to destroy a boy’s world. Because David Barrett had died in the Vietnam War, I had grown up with a photograph instead of a father, worshiping his clean, good looks in a naval uniform. Instead of listening to stories from him, I’d begged to hear stories of him and his exploits at the Citadel. At baseball games where other boys had their fathers to cheer them on, I’d consoled myself with the understanding that at least my own father had died a hero’s death.
“Don’t you get it?” Pendleton taunted. “Your mother’s a tramp. A sleazebag. She cheated on my uncle. And you’re her little illegitimate problem.”
“Tramp?” I repeated with hesitation. “Sleazebag?” I did not know what the words meant.
“A sleazebag,” Pendleton repeated with glee. “A tramp. Does bad things with other men. That’s why you don’t know who your daddy—”
My feet were planted. The sand was firm enough to give me a base. I’d never thrown a punch in my life, but from second base I could snap the ball into the catcher’s glove with an audible pop. I uncoiled my shoulder and right arm and right fist into Pendleton’s face like a throw to outgun a runner sneaking home from third.
The bone of my knuckles exploded into Pendleton’s nose.
Pendleton fell back, blood spurting instantly across his face and onto his chest. He clasped both hands to his face, yowling through his fingers and the stream of blood.
“Get up!” I screamed. I’d never lost my temper before, not to the extent of actually hitting someone. Pendleton, with his extra advantage in weight, had always been the one to bully me. I expected Pendleton to rise and fight. I needed him to rise and fight. Angry as I was, I could not attack a fallen opponent. “Get up!”
Crablike, Pendleton tried pushing away instead—a revelation of cowardice that, as we grew older, he would hate me for as thoroughly as I would learn to hate him.
“It’s not true,” I said. Fallen or not, if Pendleton spoke another word against my mother, I would drop on him, fists flying. “It’s not true. Take it back!”
Claire knelt at Pendleton’s side. She looked at the growing stream of blood running down Pendleton’s wrists and onto the sand. She then looked up at me.
“You’d better go get some help,” she said. Pendleton’s yowling grew in disbelief at the pain and shock of his broken nose. “This isn’t good.”
**
Pendleton broke the silence in the office first. “Helen called me. She told me you were back. So what are you looking for? The mama who walked out on you as a boy?”
Pendleton leaned back in his chair, smirking. “Face it. She abandoned you. Never came back for you. Never called. Never wrote. What do you think is going to happen if you ever find her? Some big tearful reunion?”
That was another one of Pendleton’s strengths. He had an instinct for a person’s weak point and
would not hesitate to use it. Throwing a punch in his face—for the second time in my life—would probably have pleased him, for he would have then known about the hurt that I would not allow my expression to show.
“I’m here in this office because of the car accident,” I said. I felt as if I were pulling a saber loose, ready to slash and cut as part of an ancient duel.
Pendleton shrugged.
To me, that said it all. His shrug. I contained my anger only because he would have no defense as I began to thrust my imaginary death sword.
“I now know the truth behind it,” I said. “I know who was driving. I have a copy of the police report. The real one.”
I watched him closely. Since getting the letter that had summoned me to Charleston, I had dreamed constantly of this moment, imagined the way his handsomeness would crack like the oil paint on Dorian Gray’s portrait, imagined the way he would quail at the sight of my sword.
His answer surprised me. “Of course you know,” he said. “You always have.”
His assumption was wrong. If I had known then that he had been driving and moved me behind the steering wheel to place the blame on me, nothing could have kept me from Claire.
“Layton had photos of you behind the wheel,” he continued. “What were you going to do, fight it in court? Make accusations you couldn’t prove?”
Anger thickened my voice like bitter phlegm. “You owe me more than a decade of my life. And I’m here to settle that debt. I’m taking this public. The media will love it. You can deal with manslaughter charges and—”
“How dramatic,” Pendleton said. “And in your pitiful way of honor, you decided to let me know first before announcing it to everyone else?”
Not only was I disappointed at the calm way he took it, the accuracy of his statement left me with little to say.
“Did you hope I would beg forgiveness?” he said, letting that smirk play on his face. “Grovel? Plead that you hide the hideous truth from all of Charleston?”
Again, his accuracy kept me silent, kept my imaginary blade in check.
“Think I moved you behind the steering wheel just so that I wouldn’t get the blame for that accident? It was much more than that, Nick. More importantly, it let me put the blame on you. So Claire would think you’d killed her brother. A man takes his opportunities when he can. And while I didn’t think you’d run like you did, the payoff was worth it.”
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 4
