Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  Kate liked to say she’d had a feeling of foreboding that day as she took her seat on the team bus to Ithaca. But in fact our parents were dead by the time she boarded. Jack heard late, too—I believe Detective Turkle himself called him, relayed the news businesslike. It wasn’t till after five that afternoon that Jack got in his Volvo to bring the disaster to Kate in person. She’d played her first match methodically, picking the top Cornell seed apart in two quick sets. Jack found her at the hotel on campus, where there were dorms for visiting teams, found her in the cafeteria. He took her outside by the arm, relayed the news. And in her confusion she slapped him across the face. That was the story she always told. She slapped Jack with half the team watching out the leaded-glass basement windows of cafeteria in Willard Straight Hall. She got in the car with him to return to Connecticut, but they only made it as far as Binghamton, found a hotel and made love the whole night through, only got back in the car the next noon. And me home cleaning the house, cleaning every little corner, Mrs. Paum washing my clothes, cycle after cycle, trying to get the gore out.

  The murder counts against Perdhomme were dismissed. And that effectively ended my role in the proceedings. Officially illusory, Kaiser was never seen or heard from again, though I looked, checking faces wherever I went, right up to the moment he appeared at Firfisle. The forensic audit of Dolus’s tangled books and papers and internal memos—two more months—turned up absurdly unambiguous evidence that three people and three people alone had conspired to steal from the company and from its richest customers, that these three had falsified documents of all kinds, bribed judges, congressmen, federal agents, bursars, treasurers, all while trading on angelic Perdhomme’s good name, a fancy embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars (these would be billions today), which they then sought to cover up with murders. No one cared to ask what would make three bad guys keep such detailed records of their crimes, or store their nefarious memos in their top desk drawers at Dolus headquarters, nor why every little memo was scrupulously typed with fresh ribbon on the same brand of bonded paper, nothing whatsoever recorded in plain handwriting.

  Dad, needless to say, was one of the bad guys in this narrative, which the media picked up and ran as the final word on the case, though he himself was dead. As were the others, two equally hapless men, freak accidents. Whatever had really gone on at Dolus, top management was so perfectly insulated that the case stopped cold and the company went on functioning, functioned right up to the great financial collapse of 2009, good riddance.

  JACK AND KATE were back. A cool breeze seemed to have followed them down from the height of the little island. “Nothing to see,” Kate said. “A very nice rock covered with moss.” Her hair was mussed and her neck mottled. No one ever looked more laid than Jack, his hair and backside spangled with moss, eyes all but crossed. We huddled on the blanket, not much time before the tide would turn. I gathered my words, cleared my throat.

  But Jack started in before I could, confident of our interest: he’d been writing, he announced, about the poet William Wordsworth’s brother John, a sea captain who’d gone down with his ship, family tragedy. The subject required Jack to give a recital of several stanzas of sea poems by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, very entertaining except for the lack of an opening for my own hot subject, and then a disquisition: “The Wordsworths had invested everything in the voyage. It was to be John’s great moment. Witnesses onboard said he seized up, didn’t order the longboats out, almost as if he had made the choice to die.”

  “He uses this in class,” Kate said, uncharacteristically languorous. “Don’t worry, he’s working his way to some big question or another.”

  Jack ignored her, continued: “One of his sailors reported later that he’d seen Captain Wordsworth alive among the other few survivors bobbing in the sea, but captain to the end, he held onto the anchor chain so as to be pulled under. Of course his life would have been worth nothing, losing his ship at that time. All that chivalrous stuff was law of the sea.”

  “The boat’s turning,” Kate said.

  “We’ve time,” Jack said. And then, “So just to finish.” And he started back in with John Wordsworth, audibly hastening.

  Etienne began to pack up the remains of our cold feast.

  But I hadn’t said my piece. And so I grabbed the anchor chain of Jack’s parable, held tight, plunged into the depths, interrupting him: “If Captain Wordsworth had been responsible, I mean, I’m not saying he was, not in the way of naval law or anything, but let’s say he’d been responsible for the deaths of many of his crew and loss of the boat, what would you think should be his fate?”

  “Oh, no question they would have executed him,” said Jack, standing, looking out to the mooring, visibly gauging our time. Distracted, he said, “There was a posthumous trial, very involved, ended in a hung jury. And he’d lost the family fortune, if not the family name, which was well buoyed by William the famous poet.”

  Kate folded the blanket thoughtfully—she knew I was up to something. I stood, said, “But more abstractly. Forgetting Captain John, who is a special case. Let’s say some other kind of boat, a more successful kind of boat. We’re the family of a crewman who’s been commanded to do something everyone knows he just can’t manage, and so of course he makes some small error, puts a fatal tear in a sail, something like that, and the captain of the ship, the guy who’s really to blame, says to the first mate, Flog him lifeless!—about our family member, I mean—and the first mate just calmly gets out the cat-o-nine-tails and goes to work till the crewman is dead.”

  “What are we getting at?” Jack said suddenly. “Just spit it out, David, all right?”

  “Captain Perdhomme came into my restaurant.”

  “Holy fuck,” Kate said.

  “David,” Jack said, quick look to his bride. “Please don’t.”

  “Just listen,” said Etienne. “It gets better.”

  “Worse,” I said. “Kaiser was with him. Not a shadow of a doubt. It was Kaiser, all right. And so that’s my question. What should family members do?”

  “David,” Jack said.

  Kate said, “They just came into the restaurant?” And then in order to preempt what she knew Jack was going to say: “That couldn’t be a coincidence.”

  Etienne clapped his hands in excitement.

  Jack gripped Kate’s hand, looked more than displeased, stared out at Deep Song, no doubt seeing the family ship sinking in whirlpools of blame, vast reputations to be lost. Reining in his contempt, he said, “What do we suppose they’re after, coming into your restaurant? I mean beyond a great meal? And how do you suppose they knew you were there?”

  “You’re not saying you don’t believe me,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you how they knew,” said Kate. And she did her imitation of Sylphide, a devastating twirl of the hands above the head ending with splayed fingers around the face.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jack said.

  BACK ON THE boat we sailed with the wind, spinnaker flying, a smooth, rolling reach directly homeward, the sun falling fast, none of the usual triumphal feeling. It seemed up to Jack to say something, and near Goat Island, he did, quietly, evenly, the rainbow sail bellied out in front of us, wind at our backs, late sun hot in our faces, words he’d said many times: “In the eyes of a court, even in the most sympathetic atmosphere, all we’ve got to link Perdhomme and the putative Kaiser remains circumstantial. So what if your father’s old boss is hanging out with your father’s alleged assassin? That’s no crime. Guilt by association, they call it. And it won’t hold up in court. And neither will an identification twenty-five years down the road, which takes care of the putative Kaiser.”

  “Putative,” I said. “You’re calling him putative again. But he’s not putative, Jack. He was in our restaurant. I identified him. The question is what to do about it, Jack. Not whether Kaiser is putative.”

  “Easy,” Etienne said.

  “We make them pay,” Kate said.

 
; “Jack, you give me credit. Say it now—Kaiser’s not putative.”

  “Now, let’s not get at cross-purposes here,” Jack said firmly. “I do give you Kaiser, okay? Kaiser is real, he’s really with Perdhomme. Done.”

  “Thank him,” Etienne said.

  “Thank you,” I said reluctantly.

  “You’re welcome,” said our captain the same. All had been going so well. He said, “And Kate. Everyone. Payback is their game. Lubbers like us won’t have a chance. If we’ve got new evidence, we should call the police, go to the D.A. Whatever we think best. But go to the authorities.”

  “The authorities aren’t always up to the job,” I said. “The police? They’ve proved it. The D.A. is worse. You remember.”

  “It’s a new outfit up there, David. It’s a whole new court, a whole new system. We go to the D.A. But we’ll need better evidence than this single sighting.”

  Long silence as we sailed with the wind, last warmth of the sun.

  Kate climbed up on the foredeck, stared ahead across the water.

  “I’ve ruined the afternoon,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Jack. “I’m sorry I was so stiff. You took me by surprise. I do give you credit. I really do. You had to say something.”

  “Say thanks again,” said Etienne.

  I felt more thankful this time: “Thanks, Jack. That means a lot.”

  “Now, gentlemen, let me sail. Our window at low tide this evening is short.”

  Etienne looked stricken: he didn’t like short windows. I felt the same, my sense of safety vanished. The shore held no landmarks for me—time, too, moving separately from my thoughts. And Kate, all separate. So I was surprised when Jack brought us windward again and we entered their inlet, slipped over the sandbar with an audible scrape of the keel. From there it would be a slow drift to mooring in the lee of the bluff.

  Kate rejoined us in the cockpit, looking nonplussed, very irritable, a bad sign.

  “Jack’s apologized,” I said. “He says he knows Kaiser is real.”

  “I know how to get them,” Kate said oblivious. “I’ve been studying up—DNA.”

  Jack wasn’t going to scoff. He said, “We’d need tissue samples. Tissue samples tied to the crime. And tied at this end to Kaiser, whom it is unlikely we’ll ever see again.”

  “Yellow sweater,” Kate said. “They found several dozen hairs on there and I have found more. Blood on the sweater. Blood evidence, too, on a pair of rubber gloves. Spittle in a Dr Pepper can. And other stuff, too, pretty much galore, once you have a person to attach it to at this end. It’s all sealed and labeled.” She looked suddenly like the scientist she’d inhabited briefly, described the forensics process, the developing legal situation. She’d read in the Times that two rapists had been convicted decades after their crimes on DNA evidence, an innocent man freed. And she’d seen in one of her genetics magazines that anyone with the cash could bring DNA material to a lab.

  “We lure them to the restaurant,” Etienne said. “Snick a little spit and curlies.”

  “Makes some sense,” Jack said. “And I’m not saying that grudgingly.”

  “DNA,” Kate said, just the faintest manic glimmer.

  “Could work,” I said. “But won’t the court consider our evidence contaminated? Out of police custody? For how long?”

  “Oh, contaminated,” Kate said. “We’ll put it back.”

  “Lord,” said Jack. “And how do we do that?”

  “Chuck will put it back,” said my sister firmly. So much for the idea that she’d ended her contact with the detective.

  “And then to the D.A.,” Jack said, resigned. “Both of you, do you hear me? Straight to the D.A.”

  “And then to the High Side,” said Kate.

  “Lord,” Jack repeated.

  “Look at me,” said Etienne, sensing my bubbling emotion. “My first day sailing and no seaweed in my lungs.”

  21

  You’d think I would have harbored a lot of resentment for Emily, but I didn’t, not really. Her life had gotten too big for her very quickly, and mine had always been too big for me. That she disappeared when my parents died seemed pretty natural. I’d have liked to have disappeared, too. That she reemerged as the star of Children of War, that was fine, too. We’d come through a trauma together, all unspoken, and really, nothing else mattered, except perhaps that Sylphide had picked us both out for whatever the dance was that she was imagining, a dance too big for the stage.

  Emily’s parents still lived in the carriage house on the Wadsworth estate, still managed the place, a thought that crossed my mind quite a bit my first year back in Westport, then infrequently: Emily must visit them sometimes, right? Last I’d heard from her was the one postcard. And until the return of Perdhomme and Kaiser I had thought of her little, then less.

  Awake all night, I caught a quick item on one of these TV gossip shows: Emily and Carter had split. I wrote Emily a note via her dance company headquarters in Miami, letting her know I’d settled back into my parents’ house, five years already, time flies, what had she been up to, breezy, like that. I didn’t mention Perdhomme. I didn’t mention my folks. I didn’t mention that our urgent hours together at Hochmeyer Haven had been coming to mind with increasing frequency, memories wrapped in violence. I mean, there I was in the very bed, on the very couch, in the very bathtub, at the very kitchen table. I did suggest that if she found herself home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or really anytime, we might get together and have a coffee.

  My phone rang four days later, rang after midnight, Lizard right there reading in the living room she and I had anointed.

  “David?”

  She was coming home the very next Thursday for a week. She could barely stand the prospect. Her mother wasn’t taking Emily’s divorce from Carter very well. But maybe Sergeant Bright would moderate things. And her brother the brigadier general would be in town, at least that. She was touring Asia starting very soon, far away at Christmastime and Thanksgiving, so the Brights were making their big holiday event out of the Korean harvest festival. “Chuseok,” she reminded me. “Ancestor Days? When all Koreans return to their hometowns to honor their people? It’s all about food. Snacks for the dead. I’d love to see you, David. I’ll carve out twenty-four hours. But I don’t want to see you in that house. I can’t believe you’re living in that house. I hope that’s not harsh. I couldn’t even go in that house, I don’t think. And I definitely don’t want to be staring over at Sylphide’s place the whole time. I see her enough as it is. And you know me—I can’t handle the competition.”

  No idea what she knew or didn’t know about Sylphide and me, I said, “We were so young.”

  Emily laughed. Emily really laughed. Emily Bright, the girl who never laughed, a long, burbling giggle like water tumbling through rocks.

  ETIENNE AND I had been blown away by the wild mushrooms and fungi in the French and Italian kitchens we’d visited in Europe. Every great restaurant had its mushroom hunter, gorgeous porcinis arriving in baskets stuffed into the back of a nondescript Fiat in Rome or chanterelles and morels recovered at a clandestine roadside drop in Chamonix. RuAngela, always with the feelers, had long since found an eccentric fellow in western Massachusetts, a mycologist whose claim to fame was having been fired from the faculty at Harvard, actually a bit of a fungus himself: Ferkie the Mushroom Man. He was full of secrets, wandered the glens and woodlots foraging, kept a basement full of mushroom logs. He’d developed practical drying and freezing techniques: year-round produce. We’d become his exclusive market in our area, and had become friends, as well, several expeditions after delicacies. RuAngela’s connection to him had been Jim Riverkeeper, proprietor of the famous Riverkeeper Inn of Lenox, Massachusetts.

  Maybe not the getaway Emily had in mind, but such was the timing: Jim and I had long planned a Monday foraging trip and a kitchen visit. Emily arrived at Firfisle by limousine after prep. And here was the thing: her head wasn’t shaved bald anymore. That phase had pas
sed. She’d grown out all that glossy, thick, sumptuous black hair and the braid was back, the precious plait. Something had made her happy: I’d never seen her smile quite like that, 1000 watts, very becoming. Etienne laughed to see her and they hugged as if they’d gotten along the first time around. RuAngela reached up to put her hands on Emily’s soaring cheekbones.

  But that was it for introductions—after a quick tour, we left the restaurant in the hands of staff and got in my decrepit Volvo: north!

  THE RIVERKEEPER INN loomed high amid horse pastures, the Colonial homestead of one patriot or another, nice stone buildings dating from before the American Revolution. When we pulled in, Jim popped out the kitchen door, huge man, a solid four hundred pounds but light on his feet, grumpy manner, linen-service kitchen-togs, a real chef’s toque cocked on his head.

  “I haven’t seen so many Black people in one place since I left Boston!” he said. We laughed, but it wasn’t clear he was joking.

  His wife, Jean, was as big as he, pink and cheery and snugged into a gigantic in-your-face uplift bra, the obvious boss of the place, droll and forceful. “No rest for the wicked,” she said, and whisked us off on an overly detailed tour of the stately dining rooms, the antique billiards room, the Prohibition-era basement tavern. We paused in the stained-glass stairwell, like standing in a church, each on our own level, Emily above.

  Shortly, E.T. and Jim settled down to inspect the new wood-burning beehive oven, made pizzas on bare brick for a snack before lunch. Not a word between us, Emily and I retrieved our bags from the Volvo, climbed the stairs to the exquisite room she’d picked, twin beds in an alcove on the third floor. “I honestly think we should make love right now,” she said.

  I was not against the idea.

  FERKIE TURNED UP while Emily and I napped and snuggled, or maybe while we made love a second time (old desire insatiable), took no particular notice of us when we joined the group, all but climbed down Jean’s fantastical cleavage over our second lunch—complained about the “freaky” pizza Jim and Etienne had invented, leek cream and woven stripes of vegetable: puréed dal for the warp, kale pesto for the woof.