“If you’d ever like to talk with someone about your brother,” he said, “call me.” He scribbled down his number. “Only if you’d like.” His manner was almost apologetic.
I hadn’t been aware of wanting anything since Steven died, as if, like the kitten on my bureau, I was preserved in a state of stillness.
Something in the way Victor had spoken to me, the surprise of his friendship with Steven, the promise of information about my brother, provoked me.
“I don’t want to push you to talk, but I knew your brother well,” he said.
“How well?” I asked, my defenses at risk.
“We saw each other often, nearly every day, including the afternoon he died.”
He pushed the slip of paper with his telephone number on it across the table.
In biology lecture I kept my eyes on the clock over the lectern—one of those clocks with a minute hand that jumped three minutes at a time. The lecture hall was full, so I sat in the back, my head down, taking notes for what seemed hours and hours, until finally the class was over and I hoisted the heavy book bag on my shoulder, leaving first before anyone else, before the professor had reassembled his notes, heading out the swinging door and down the corridor toward my father’s office.
A young woman I’d never seen before, with red hair and tiny feet the size of a child’s, was seated in my father’s chair, leaning over papers spread out on the table he used as a desk, drinking a Diet Pepsi from a can. Something my father would never do at this desk, which had belonged to his grandfather.
The desk was cherry, made by his grandfather for the kitchen of the family’s cottage in Llangollen, North Wales, and was my father’s only treasure besides his airplane.
I wanted to tell the woman to pick up her papers and her Diet Pepsi before she ruined the wood.
A small transgression by Dr. Delores Lucas, a resident in infectious diseases substitute teaching my father’s classes for the semester, I discovered later.
But I was enraged just at the sight of her infringing on our lives—a careless, red-haired girl with tiny feet, one high-heeled strappy shoe kicked off like an insult to the Frayn family, lying on its side on the brightly colored Welsh rug.
In the pocket of my trousers was the torn piece of paper with Victor Duarte’s telephone number. I walked to the end of the corridor, slipped into a telephone booth, dropped two quarters in the slot and dialed.
“I’m calling for Victor Duarte,” I said to the man who answered the phone, my heart thumping in my chest so hard it almost felt visible through my red T-shirt, thin as I was.
There was reason for me to be nervous, but at that moment, perhaps in my innocence or even arrogance, I believed that I understood Victor Duarte, the way a person does who has some knowledge of chemical properties, a science student or a cook or even a young woman like me, who believed, as I then did, that I had a particular gift of intuition and that, with my training in life sciences, I could imagine the life of a stranger from a single detail.
In the case of Victor Duarte, the secret was in his hands.
“This is Victor,” he said.
“I’m Steven Frayn’s sister,” I said.
“Oh, hello.”
Just the absence of a personal greeting disarmed me. Maybe he had forgotten my name. Maybe I was of no importance to him except as a recipient of news about Steven.
“You suggested I call.”
“I’m glad you have.”
He must have been smoking, because I heard a slow intake of breath.
“I’d very much like to have a conversation with you about your brother.” He hesitated. There was something compelling and comforting in his voice, its low, gravelly tone, its measured calm.
“I want you to know that I admired Steven beyond words,” he said.
I pressed the receiver close to my ear.
“I’ve been thinking you’d probably like to know about me, since I’m a stranger and you have a right to feel threatened by strangers, especially now,” he said, the formal precision of his speech familiar, reminding me of my father.
“I’m a civil engineer with an interest in law and ethics, which is why I sometimes take my lunch hour to study in the library.”
He spoke in a whisper as if the information were classified.
“I’m single, and I live just south of Union Station with my sister, Isabel, who’s three years younger than me,” he said. “The same age difference between you and Steven.”
It was a small detail, the kind that suggests a keen ear, a capacity for intimacy, and I took note, making something of it, a close friendship with my brother, grounds for trust.
Victor Duarte was cunning. I’m sure he knew what he was doing, but a year ago last May I knew nothing of the subtle intricacies of relationships.
And so we agreed to meet in a small café called Café Rouge on the edge of the campus after my last class of the day.
3
I arrived early. I’d never been to this café at Twenty-second and G in the middle of the university campus, although I’d often walked down the street on my way to meet Eva at Daisy’s Coffee and Sweets. But this place I’d never noticed, a slip in the wall between two buildings, nothing to define it except for a dark red door, CAFÉ ROUGE written in purple letters across the top.
Victor Duarte must have chosen the place for its darkness. I could barely see my way across the crowded room, with its polished wooden tables and booths lit by low-wattage lamps with green glass shades hanging over the middle of the tables.
I chose a booth in the corner, self-consciously alone, checking the room to see if I’d been noticed. I pulled out the menu that was stuck behind the salt and pepper, holding it under the dim light. A limited menu, handwritten—sandwiches, fried fish, chili, beer, wine, coffee. A cover charge at night for live music. I could barely see the clientele, although I judged from the muted, earnest conversations that they were mainly graduate students. Probably older students came to this café, which was why I didn’t know of it—degree candidates in business and law, working students who went to school at night, students who had careers.
When Victor Duarte slipped into the seat across from me, I was flipping through the pages of my entomology text.
He had changed clothes, wearing jeans and a starched red shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a bandanna around his head, his face damp with perspiration, although the weather that afternoon was cool. He had on old work boots full of caked mud, which I didn’t notice until later, when he walked out of the café in front of me.
“I’ve never been here,” I said, my mouth dry with nerves, the words sticking to my tongue.
“I’m not surprised.”
He ordered a beer and a bag of pretzels and reached into his back pocket for two folded newspapers that he put on the table.
“You?” he asked.
“Just coffee.”
“Regular students don’t come here, which is why you’re not aware of it,” he said.
“Who does?”
An expression of amusement slid across his eyes, as if he were remembering a private joke. Something I’d see in his face again and again in the next month.
“For a long time, ever since Martin Luther King was killed—Were you even alive then?” He smiled at me, and probably I blushed.
“I wasn’t.”
“Nor was I, but I know that since the riots in Washington after his death, Café Rouge has been a political meeting place for all kinds of people with a gripe about the state of affairs—occasionally students, but mainly the underclass, working class, immigrants.”
He opened the pretzels, dumping them on the table, pushing some in my direction.
“Help yourself.”
He looked up, and I noticed he had a deep dimple in his chin and that his eyes in the dim green light were flat, too black for me to see the pupils.
For no reason I could name—my own peculiar dread, a vague notion of danger, caffeine I shouldn’t have ordered, I was
trembling.
“Where did you meet Steven?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from rising.
“Here,” Victor said. “I met him over a year ago in the winter.” He indicated a long, crowded table across the room, mostly men, one woman, her back to me, with steel-gray hair to her waist.
“I was sitting at that table with my buddies, like Rosie over there with the gray hair, and we were having a beer together when your brother walked into the café alone.”
He rested his heavy arm next to my folded hands.
“How did you know it was Steven?” I asked.
“I recognized him from the newspaper.”
He picked up one of the articles he’d taken out of his pocket, unfolded it and put it down on the table between us.
“Check out that photograph.”
I held the newspaper up just under the light. There was a grainy picture I recognized from the front page of the Metro section, taken the previous October. It was a group photograph that my mother had clipped and framed, propping it among the photographs of strangers in the living room. Three young men and a woman. It had been taken at a vigil for a young George Washington University law student from Trinidad killed in an attack on homosexuals at a bar on P Street. Steven, identified as “outspoken law-student leader Steven Frayn,” had spoken at the vigil. The woman standing next to him, the only other person named in the photograph, was Anna See, his girlfriend at the time.
He folded the newspaper and put it back in his pocket.
“I knew it was Steven when he came in the café because I’d saved the newspaper, and when I saw him, I put two and two together.”
“He never told me anything about you.”
“Steven was a man of secrets.”
“Not with us,” I said quickly, ashamed to fall upon information about my brother from a stranger.
“We’re a close family.” I was defensive. “Steven probably told you that.”
“I sensed from things he said.”
“We all live together, sort of on top of each other in the same little house.” The words came toppling out. “Even my aunt and uncle and cousin. We’re that close.”
“You’re very lucky,” he said. “It’s rare to have a close family anymore.”
“Maybe.” I was tentative.
Were we that close? We thought of ourselves as an island pitched in the middle of the sea, but perhaps such thinking was illusion or desperate hope; perhaps we were only our own story of a close family. My father in his hangar, me in my sanctuary for the dead, and Julia. Poor Julia. I had a rush of feeling for my mother, with her photographs of strangers framed among the pictures of us, as if there were never enough company in her house.
Rubbing my hands, which were damp with nerves, my eyes wandering as if I were in the process of a neurological event, I tried to concentrate on Victor’s face.
“Did Steven mention that we live very quietly?” I asked. “We’re not political.”
I could feel the ground shifting, the way it does at the edge of the water when the waves come in and drag the sand back with them. Going under is how it felt, the water over my head.
“How can I explain?” He spoke slowly, his brow furrowed, as though he wanted to be sure I understood the exact nature of what he was saying, that he didn’t mislead me or let out the wrong truth by accident. “I’m part of a group called DTT which stands for Demand Tolerance Today. Steven didn’t belong, but we thought of him as a kind of heroic figure, sympathetic to our point of view, with the courage to speak out.”
My chest tightened, the air trapped in my throat.
So Julia had been right about Steven.
“He never told me anything about your group,” I said.
“He wouldn’t have mentioned us,” he said. “We don’t advertise ourselves.”
I looked away, unable to meet his steady gaze, feeling a little sick from too much coffee or excitement or fear.
“You don’t have to believe me,” he said. “I can’t give you proof, but I’m going to ask for your help.”
He was breaking up the pretzels into small pieces with a kind of nervous fastidiousness, ordering them in stacks lined up exactly. In the light over the table, I could see black dirt in the lines of his hands, marked by work.
“Steven talked about you.”
He ran his hands through his hair—hands, I noticed, in constant motion, palm to palm, folded in a grip, pulling at his chin as if he had a beard.
“Steven told me you’re a biologist.”
“He told you that?”
“Well, you are, aren’t you?”
I flushed. “A biology student,” I said. “Not a biologist yet.”
“But you will be.” Victor checked his watch, rubbed it against his shirt and checked again. “It’s getting late, and I’ve got something going on tonight.”
“Six o’clock, and my uncle is picking me up soon.”
“Then I’ll hurry. I have something else from the newspaper to show you.”
He unfolded a page from the Washington Post, the print smudged and faded.
“November fourteenth last year,” he said, flattening the newspaper on the table, pushing it across to me. “Check the third page of the first section, bottom of the fold.” He pressed his broad thumb on a photograph. “This photograph.”
The picture was of two men and the shadow of a third. I squinted to read the caption under it.
The older man in the photograph was Charles Reed just after his swearing in as an assistant attorney general of the United States. He was standing with his son, Benjamin, a graduate student in musical composition at the University of Michigan. In the right-hand corner, his back to the camera, was the president of the United States.
I pushed the page across the table, my mind racing. Did Victor Duarte know about us? Had Steven told him personal stories, and had he heard that Charles Reed had fired my aunt Faith on the day that Steven died? Did he know about the Justice Department flag?
“Are you asking do I know these people?” I said.
“You know who Charles Reed is,” he said. “Your aunt worked for him.”
“How did you know that?”
“From Steven, and now the story’s gotten around.” His face was too close to mine. I could feel his breath, my own breath trapped in my throat.
“You must have read the op-ed piece that Steven wrote about the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department,” I said.
“He showed the piece to me the night he died.”
He folded the paper and put it back in his pocket, looking just past me as if at something behind my head.
“Something else,” he began, clearing his throat. “I’ve reason to think that Benjamin Reed might have had some role in your brother’s death.”
I pressed my fingers hard against my mouth until my lips went numb.
“We have been suspicious of Benjamin for a while.”
I heard his voice at a distance, as if he were speaking from across the room, and I had to strain to hear him, in spite of a crushing pressure on my chest.
“ ‘We’ is the DTT. The same group I mentioned to you. I knew Benjamin, not well, but I knew him in elementary school.”
I checked my hands to see if they were shaking, and they were, and my throat was closing, the air too thin in the café. I wanted to go home.
“I think I smell smoke,” I said.
“Cigarettes,” he said.
“It smells like something’s burning.”
“Nothing’s burning,” he said. “You’re probably nervous. I would be in your place.”
“We don’t talk about politics in my family,” I said, as if politics were the subject of our conversation. My head resting against the wall was such a weight, as if, unhinged, it might drop off. “We never talk about politics. Even after Steven was killed and we had to wonder—”
“You must understand that I’m not saying Benjamin Reed was the one. Just that he might know something.”
He got up from the booth, pulled a chair over to the end of the table so he could sit closer to me, speaking quietly. “Once, at this café, Steven and I were having a beer, and your name came up, and he spoke about you with real sweetness. ‘A true believer,’ is what he said of you. I knew I’d be pleased to meet you sometime. Not like this, but sometime.”
I looked down at the shiny wood table, memorizing its grain.
“What I’d like from you—and this is what I mean by help, and please know you’re a free agent and ought to come to your own decision—but I’d like to meet Benjamin Reed. I’d like to have a chance to talk to him.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.”
He tipped his chair back, and at that angle, a shadow falling across one side of his face, his expression disturbed me. I felt vaguely ill.
“I was thinking you could begin a correspondence with him—with Benjamin Reed—and when he comes back to Washington in the summer to visit his father, which I’m sure he’ll do, you can arrange to meet him, and we’ll find an opportunity for you to introduce him to me.”
He folded his arms behind his head casually, as if we were having an easy conversation about nothing at all.
“I have no reason to write a stranger,” I said.
“You’d invent a reason,” he said. “Anything. You can say anything to engage his interest. But you can’t be yourself of course—not Claire Frayn. He’d figure that out in a second.”
Now, in the present time, I can’t for the life of me re-create the texture of that moment except as fact. My hands were clasped, my fingers gripped to stop the shaking. Victor Duarte reached over, unfolded my hands, flattened the palms down on the table and put his own hands on top of mine, pressing them into the wood until the tension broke and the trembling stopped and I found myself like a sleepwalker acquiescing to his plan.
I suppose it also made a kind of sense to me that all the pieces of the story of what happened on the day of Steven’s murder—the Justice Department flag, Charles Reed and Faith and the op-ed about the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department—could fall together and include Charles Reed’s son.
A Student of Living Things Page 9
