The night sky was framed in a hinged square eave window. From his bed in the inn, Willow watched the black clouds rolling in from the northeast, gradually covering the stars. The wind had picked up noticeably and the temperature was below' zero.
Willow lay aw’ake, staring, waiting for sleep. He considered going back downstairs to the tavern to have another scotch by the fire, to watch aw'ay the embers crumbling through the grate.
He sighed and looked at his watch. It would be so easy to get up and drive directly to Kennedy. To fly home. Fly home to England. Six hours’ flight time home. Instead he’d be up in the morning and out on the frozen roadway to search for Tully’s will. Then on and on beyond that until he’d found his man, a living, breathing contemporary human who lay somewhere right now in a bed, sleeping.
Willow hoped deeply that his quest would fail.
Chapter The Fourth
1
On the windy steps of the Surrogate’s Court for Orange County, a man stood shivering in a heavy overcoat. His breath came in pale puffs of vapor; his hair turned and twisted as he moved his freezing head in the wind. He looked at his wristwatch; then, cupping his hands over his ears, he scowled up the street.
Willow stepped briskly past him and entered the courthouse lobby. Behind a counter, the information clerk sat at her desk with a sweater over her shoulders watching a maintenance man work on a long radiator.
“May I help you?”
“Yes. I’m tracing a man named Henry Tully who died here in Goshen in 1811. I’d like to see his probate packet if it exists.” She stood up. “Yes. Come through this gate, please. Probate records that old are down in the archives.” She smiled. “Anything to get out of the draft. Do you think spring will ever come?”
“Yes,” said Willow, smiling. “I’ll give you a guarantee in writing.”
He followed her down the steps and into a room shelved to the ceiling with heavy, case-bound dockets of wills and intestate records. On a table were the Surrogate Clerk's Indexes to Administration and Estates.
“What was the man's name?”
“Tully. Henry Tully.”
“In 1811, you say?”
“Yes.”
The woman opened an index, consulted the alphabetic table in the front and picked off the page number and opened to it. “Tully. Tully. Hannah Tully?”
“Yes. His wife. Here. Here’s Henry.”
The clerk glanced at the liber number, then turned, reading the numbers on the spines along the shelves. “Liber 28. There it is. Both of them are in the same liber.”
She reached up and lifted it down—a heavily bound thick volume. “Why don’t you sit right there in that chair? If you want to make any photographic copies, I have a machine upstairs. It’s twenty-five cents per copy.”
Willow nodded at her and eagerly thrust his coat from him in a ball and sat.
“She’s on page 214 and he’s on page 235,” said the clerk. “The entire packet is there.”
He only half-heard her steps going up the stairs. He went to Hannah’s packet first. Quickly he leafed through the petition for probate of the will dated November 29, 1808, bond of administration, the will itself, notice to creditors, the list of inventory and appraisement, and the decree of distribution. Then he turned back and read the will, scanning the customary legal phrasing, the verbal catchalls and protestations, then the list of species. Here his reading began to slow: Hannah Kirk Gorges Tully left a set of pewterware to a sister in Boston (Mrs. George Bestwick). She singled out her own three children for specific bequests from the goods and chattels of her home. She selected her husband, “the most loving, gentle man ever to tread the earth,” as her executor and prayed God to be merciful with her peccant soul. Hannah Kirk Gorges. Kirk her maiden name and Gorges a previous marriage? And a sister?
Ian McMurray had indicated that Mrs. Tully had seemingly dropped from the skies historyless.
Willow turned his attention to Henry’s probate packet. He riffled the pages to identify the customary documents, noted the letters of administration cum testamento annexo> noted that Henry’s son, Edwin, from New Haven was appointed the executor, noted the inventory and decree of distribution, then returned to the will.
As with Hannah’s will, the clerk had laboriously copied the original document by hand. In the flowing script of the professional copyist, Henry’s final wishes unfolded themselves.
It began in standard nomenclature:
“In the name of God the Father in Heaven be it known that this is the last will and testament of Henry Tully of Goshen, Orange County, New York, husband of the late Hannah Kirk Gorges Tully and son of the late Joseph Tully, wine merchant of London, England.”
Henry protests his heart’s anguish at the separation of his country from its motherland and at the separation of his life and family from “my father, who died with his heart hardened against me and mine for my participation in the late Revolution of the Colonies.” He laments, too, the loss of the friendship of his three brothers.
He praises God for the gift of Hannah as his cherished wife. Here, a word caught Willow’s eye. A shocking word. Another. Willow stopped, astonished, and reread the sentence.
“But—” he said aloud to the will. He leaned back in the chair and looked around the vault. His eyes returned to the will and finished reading it. He stood up and stared down at the page.
It must be so. Willow reached into his briefcase and pulled out a road map. He needed to get to Boston as quickly as possible.
2
Mrs. Abigail Withers stood in the middle of her empty living room. She had on her heaviest wool hat and her imported tweed coat with the fur collar. Johnny, the terrier, in his plaid cover prowled around her ankles, trailing his leash, whining and sitting, then whining and walking by turns. The canary cage stood on the floor beside her. Inside, the bird moved restlessly, cheeping and trilling. His calls rang hollowly in the empty apartment. The wrecker's bashing ball distantly cannonaded another hole in another brick wall.
Mrs. Withers looked down at the whining dog and the shrilling bird. Abruptly, softly, she wept. Her fingers probed limply into her handbag and withdrew a handkerchief. She balled it and pushed it up under her eyeglasses, dabbed at her nose and sighed.
“Enough of that, you two babies. I told you we’ll have a nice new home soon—just a cab ride away. Now, let’s go.”
Stooping, she caught the end of the leash, pulled the straps of her dangling handbag up on her forearm, then rose erect with cage and leash. As she stepped toward the doorway, she heard a footfall in the hallway.
“Ah-ha,” said Peter Richardson. “Made it! I thought sure I was going to miss you. Couldn’t get away from that office phone. So—” He strode around the empty living room. “It’s done. I see they’ve loaded the truck down there. Is that your cab waiting?”
Mrs. Withers looked at him with great solemnity. She wept again.
“Aah ah ah ah ah, Abby.” He gripped her arm. “It’ll all be as good as new when you get set up.” He watched her slowly shaking her head.
“It can never be the same, Peter. I’m too old to take myself in with fables. Once it’s broken and done, that’s it; broken and done. I feel like this old building. Useless and unneeded, something to be tom down and thrown away.”
“Come on, Abby. Bright thoughts.”
“It’s true,” she sighed. “But I’m not crying about that. It’s Ozzie. Oh, dear God in heaven, I haven’t slept a wink. Where can he be? I’m sure he’d be here to see me off if he were able. I can’t help but believe that something’s happened to him.” She walked about the room, touching the light switches with her fingers, smoothing the fold in an abandoned curtain, softly shutting a closet door. “Something has happened to him.”
Richardson listened unhappily. “Ahhh, Abby. He’ll turn up.”
“Saying doesn’t make it so.”
She stood in the pale winter light and touched her fingers doubtfully to her lips. “I just can’t leave like this.”
<
br /> “Yes, you can. I told you—the minute I have any news I’ll call you. And I’ll be there for dinner tomorrow night.”
She crooked a finger at him. “My phone is already installed. Same number. Don’t fail to call.”
“I won’t. I’ll call. I’ll call.”
The dog whined and the bird fluttered in the swinging cage and Abby Withers seemed disoriented. She looked out at the quadrangle of red-tinged snow roiled across the field. “It’s all ending badly. You have no apartment to move to, Ozzie is missing, and his cat—listen, Peter, his cat. I must tell you. She’s down in the basement, crying. I tried to get her—oh, any number of times. I brought food down to her. And I think one of the Abernathys' moving men kicked her or something. Listen, Peter, you get that cat and bring her to me. She’s alone and confused. Peter, I tell you Ozzie would never leave his cat like that.”
“I’ll get the cat, Abby. And I’ll bring it in a cab. You can keep it until Ozzie turns up...”
“And his plants. You’ll have to water them. I did them all today. But they need water every five to seven days.”
“Yes, yes. Abby. It’ll be all right. I’ll take care of everything. Come on, now. Pull yourself together. In a few days, you’ll be all settled again.”
Abby Withers walked slackly to the doorway with her dog and her birdcage and wended her way down the hall, down the stairs, across the lobby to the front door. The dog walked hesitantly by her side, looking upward for directions as he went. She stopped in the lobby. “My God,” she exclaimed. “I forgot the cover for the cage. He’ll freeze out there.” She groped a hand into her bag and pulled out a quilted lump.
Richardson took it from her and draped it around the cage, then knotted the tie strings. “There. He’s all set to travel.”
Abby Withers reached up and touched his face. “You’re a good friend, Peter.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet, Abby.”
He opened the door for her. “Call me when you get there.”
“Yes.” Carefully, sideways, she descended the outside steps and entered the cab. The driver shut the door after her, then drove off.
Now, two apartments were empty.
3
Richardson descended the outside steps in the perpetual dusk of the sullen winter day.
Heavily dressed against the weather, he followed the frozen snow prints, followed them again to the middle of the quadrangle where the wind-scoured earth was bald of snow. No tracks. Directly ahead of him the crane stood in the distance. The ball swung on the boom and struck yet again, sending another clatter of building materials to the ground. Plaster dust rose above it and the earth vibrated.
Richardson walked slowly toward the crane. He felt menaced by it, yet fascinated. The ball had eaten halfway through a brick house and store. As he drew closer, he could see the old tin-sheeted ceiling of the store hanging down in broad metal strips. In the rooms above, exposed like underdrawers, were the papered walls of someone’s former home. He could see scuff marks from furniture on the wallpaper and square outlines where pictures had hung. A green pull shade still hung halfway down just as it was left, blocking winter’s pallid light from an empty and half-gone bedroom.
The cold and loneliness and the architectural slaughter and the never-gone fear in his stomach depressed him. He turned away from the ruins to walk slowly back to the Brevoort House. Soon it too would show the frozen outdoor world of winter the colors and hues and mute marks of life on its papered walls.
Soon the whizzing, chained cannonball would arc dowrn and through Abby’s window, carrying all before it, window frame, glass fragments, bricks—and Abby’s ghostlike, abandoned curtain, rising high, fluttering softly around the implacable ball.
Richardson saw again the tracks left by Ozzie’s feet. He paused to stand staring down at them. Presently he turned to look at the ranks of empty buildings behind him. Where had Ozzie been going?
Richardson turned and watched as the wrecker’s ball dropped an entire side of the building into the street in a thunder of noise.
The green shade and its window were gone.
4
Pew had slicked it out. It read as smooth as butter. But there were still flaws in the structure. Richardson sat on his backless stool in the middle of his living room looking down at the thirty-odd pages of manuscript, seeking, groping for a shape.
He shook his head, remembering Pew’s words. “Existential man was wombed in a German oven and, born, walked into the world from a concentration camp.” Heeesh. He looked down again at the sheets on the floor, mentally shifting the sequence of elements.
Inappropriately, without preparation, the memory of Tom Jones intruded on his thoughts. He sat up, recalling Tom Jones, and was filled with gratitude. Like an old friend, a college days’ friend, Tom Jones was there, patient, benevolent, enduring. Not seen or heard from since college days. Squire Allworthy presented himself along with the earthy Squire Western—and Sophia. Sophia and the sunshine and green rain of the eighteenth-century English countryside. How green was his memory of it. He felt a strong desire to read the book.
5
Richardson left the stool, left the strewn papers and crouched before a bookcase. He found it and pulled it out. He looked for a place to sit. Wine. A glass of wine. Wine? Port. Why port? He went to his liquor cabinet and poked among the bottles. Sherry. Riesling. Burgundy. Port. Never opened. Port? Come on. Yes, port.
Richardson pulled the cork and poured a glass of port. Then he sat down with the wine at his elbow and opened the pages of Tom Jones.
He took a gratifying sip of wine.
“My God,” he said aloud. “I’m pregnant.”
It was astonishing. He found he could quote with near accuracy a number of passages of the novel. He recalled with great vividness Blifil’s episode with the bird, Squire Allworthy’s great sickness and Tom’s drunken screed. And Fielding’s salty, sane disquisitions on Tom and London and life. A man who didn’t squint at human nature and didn’t lament. Balance.
Richardson wondered how he had acquired such a vivid memory of the book. He read passages with great enjoyment, skipping from section to section. When he looked up, he found that he’d nearly finished the wine. He recalled Goulart’s cat and decided to go down and get it from the basement.
He rose, puzzled. It seemed as though there was a third element missing—the book and the port and something else. What was it he couldn’t quite remember? He felt as though he could reach his arm into a dark tunnel and touch it—the thing forgotten. But he didn’t—didn’t reach, didn’t remember. He didn’t remember because...
He didn't remember because he was afraid to.
6
Abby’s front door was shadowed. He felt the emptiness behind it. As he descended, he passed Clabber’s silent door and Goulart’s; next, Griselda’s. On the first floor he heard a radio in the Carsons’ apartment, then stepped past the Abemathys’ vacant apartment. He opened the door to the basement and snapped on the lights. He stood at the head of the stairs and listened. Hearing no sound, he descended and looked at the wooden bins.
“Here, puss,” he called. No sound. Under pale rafter lights he walked slowly down the corridor between the bins. “Here, puss.” At the end of the corridor was a door and he opened it. A large room, empty, with an exit door at the side wall. No cat. He pushed the door to and turned. “Here, puss.”
Goulart’s cat appeared. She stood at the other end of the corridor, at the foot of the stairs. She mewed softly.
“Here, puss.” Richardson walked slowly toward her. He got closer. “Okay, puss, just hold still.”
But she didn’t. She sprang up four or five steps, then leaped through the boards of a tenant bin. Richardson opened the bin door. “Come on, puss.” He saw her eyes that glowed yellow for a moment before she stepped off the back of a couch and ghosted away.
Richardson tried for fifteen minutes to get the cat. Then he mounted the gritty stairs to the top and turned. “When you
get good and hungry, I’ll be back,” he said. He put out the light and shut the door behind him.
The silence and the darkness stole back up the cellar stairs and waited.
7
Whoosh!
Richardson opened his eyes.
He was in the wingback chair. Tom Jones had slipped to his lap. Arrayed around the chair on the floor were the sheets of manuscript.
The sound had occurred right in front of him, right in front of his face, right in the middle of the living room. He stood up urgently and the novel tumbled to the floor. Lights were on throughout his apartment. He quickly strode through the rooms. It was two-thirty.
He was alone.
8
Richardson felt beset, tormented. It was an hallucination. Had to be. Someone was doing this to him. Minute doses of an hallucinatory drug in his food. Seizing the bottle of port, he carried it to the kitchen. He poured the remaining liquid down the drain. He opened the door to his refrigerator and studied the interior. He threw away a jar of mustard. A jar of ketchup. Mayonnaise. Jam. Salad oil. Pickles. He filled his kitchen wastebasket. A box of salt. All his sugar. Pepper. Flour. Coffee. Tea. Several paper sacks were filled. He went to the bathroom cabinet and got his toothpaste. Then he sat down on the wing-back chair and stared at the frozen darkness outside his window, expectantly, patiently, like a man waiting for someone.
At nine a.m., Richardson called a medical center and made an appointment for a thorough physical examination, including his ears.
“I particularly want tests to determine the presence of any drugs in my body.”
9
He found her legs lovely.
They were long and slim. Symmetrical. And her personality was altogether “right.” Her face proclaimed it, the sly mirth in her eyes flashed it. Willow could easily place her in the cockpit of his sailboat beating into port under a squall, her face and hair rain-rilled. She had merriness lurking about her eyes and a sense of—of humor, and more, of absurdity. Willow wanted to try to make her laugh, wanted to hear her laugh. If her laughter tinkled, if it trilled and rippled, if it struck no false notes, no artificial construction—ah then, if it rang, he was had. Set. Taken. She’d own him.
The Search for Joseph Tully Page 7
