Concert of Ghosts

by Campbell Armstrong

  They moved in the direction of Golden Gate Park. The wind made trees shudder, the sky turned toward rain. He hesitated. He’d go back, make her see the sense in what he had to say. He’d lay out before her the skeleton of the past. Bone by bone he’d show her how her life was filled with mystifying gaps she couldn’t fill, how she’d been transformed from flamboyant Maggie Silver into this other person, this Barbara Gill. How long would it take?

  “I’m sorry, Harry. About everything.”

  Tennant stared into the traffic. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, let the whole fucking world be sorry, what did it matter? He kicked at the sidewalk in despair. “This is the bit I don’t get. Why did they let Maggie live? I can see how my father protected me, but why wasn’t she killed like Carlos and Kat? That’s the bit that evades me.” He paused, his mouth very dry. “If I push myself I can see the kind of thinking that goes like this: They can’t murder everybody in the photograph, it’s too much, it’s overkill, so you make one look like suicide, another an accident, and one is made to look like a total schizoid. The other two—well, they get their shutters pulled down on their windows. They get their shades well and truly drawn. Only Sajac got away. For a time.”

  Bitterness in his voice. A couple of blocks away Maggie Silver lived out her life in awful ignorance of her history. What did she do with her days? Work in a public library? Sling cocktails? Whatever it was, she’d go through the motions without ever asking questions, the way he’d tended his doomed farm in New York. Ignorant, plodding, never examining the past to see what it contained because neither of them was supposed to have a past.

  “It would have been simpler to have killed us both,” he said.

  Alison frowned. She said nothing as they wandered through traffic to the edge of the park. Her expression was strange, regretful, and apprehensive. She was about to tell him something, except she didn’t want to. It was obvious to him.

  Tennant stood still. The wind blew at his coat, flapping it.

  “I think I know why they didn’t kill Maggie,” the girl said.

  He looked at her face and thought: I don’t want to hear this, whatever it is. He was balanced on a dreadful moment.

  “Be patient with me,” she said. “Try to understand. Don’t be angry with me.”

  He waited. The collar of his coat blew against his cheek. A spot of rain hung in the air. Alison took a creased piece of paper from her purse.

  “Here.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  “Take it. Look at it.”

  He reached for it with great reluctance. He read the words typed on it, but they didn’t mean anything to him.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “A birth certificate.”

  He looked at it again. Words had a way of escaping before your eyes. You stared at one word long enough and it shed the skin of its meaning. It lost all relevance. “My birth certificate, Harry.”

  He gazed into her face and wondered why he’d been too dense, too blind, to perceive it before. He might have felt it in some uncertain way, but now, dear God, it was obvious. From a certain angle, with the light touching her in exactly the right way, she looked like Maggie.

  18

  Bewildered, head down against the squall that had begun to shift through the trees, Tennant walked quickly. There has to be a way of dealing with this and all its implications, something nice and easy. An opiate against comprehension, a prophylactic to prevent understanding. When he raised his face, rain blew into his eyes and against his lips. With his canvas bag thumping against his leg, he stepped under a tree for shelter, seeing across the grassland the entrance to the Conservatory of Flowers. It was an elaborate structure of glass whose panes were wet and glossy. A group of tourists stood outside, huddled under bright umbrellas. A birth certificate, he thought. She gives me a birth certificate with her mother’s name typed in the appropriate column.

  And zero under Father.

  He saw her hurrying to catch up with him. He didn’t want to hear explanations, excuses, he wanted nothing more than to stand beneath this goddamn tree and listen to the way rain beat on leaves and branches. A tree house, that was what he needed now, his old tree house—he’d climb up into it and hide and keep the world away. He recalled Rayland perspiring in the upper branches, his hammer driving nails into planks of wood, the occasional yelp of pain when Rayland struck his hand with the head of the hammer. Harry’s Place. Where was Harry’s Place now? Rotted, slats weathered, nails rusted and loose, a shell overgrown with foliage.

  The girl stepped under the branches. “Harry, listen to me.”

  “You lied to me.” It’s more than a lie, but you don’t want to confront it.

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “What would you call it, Alison?” He moved, heading quickly toward the conservatory. At the entrance desk he paid his fee and stepped inside, where the atmosphere was humid and the air smelled of green things growing in damp soil. His last time here he’d been out of his mind on acid, and the place was filled with monstrous menace. Now he was sober and straight and wished he wasn’t. He passed under a giant overhanging philodendron that looked as old as the planet itself.

  The girl was still tracking him. He walked away, deeper into the conservatory, the tangled vines, roots, mosses, flying fronds. A jungle, steamy and ill-lit, trapped under vast panes of glass, a controlled experiment in growth, temperature, and humidity neatly maintained. He was sweating hard, moisture running across his face. When he found a bench he sat down, exhausted by the lack of air.

  “Harry, please listen to me.”

  The girl approached him slowly. He turned away, seeing two men in raincoats study the tangled roots of an enormous philodendron that resembled more a mutated prehistoric bird than a plant. Two men in raincoats, he thought. But they weren’t looking at him.

  The girl sat alongside him. “Listen. Maggie had me adopted at birth. Something I only learned about eighteen months ago. I spent most of the last year looking for her. I didn’t have an address. I only had Obe’s photograph, Harry, and the names in Cygnet’s files. I went after them. You know what I found. And then I came across you.”

  “And I led you to her.”

  Alison drummed her fingertips on her thighs and sighed. Tennant undid the buttons of his coat. His jeans were damp, clinging to skin. “The story’s all bullshit,” he said. “There’s no magazine assignment.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “I don’t like that kind of ambiguity.”

  “I work for the magazine, sure—”

  “But not on this.”

  She shook her head. “Not on this.”

  He stood up. The humidity was smothering him. “This is what you’d call more personal, right?” He remembered the chalet, the room, her thin body pressed against him, the moment of intimacy that had broken down under the weight of Maggie Silver’s intrusion. He felt remote from himself all at once. The birth certificate, no father’s name. I don’t want to think. But there had been undeniable feelings, there had been caring, even—God help him—some naive consideration of a future in which this girl might have played a part. How sightless he’d been. How goddamn unseeing.

  She was watching him. He met her eyes briefly, then looked elsewhere. There ought to be birds in here, he thought. Not just these great silent growths and the sound of running water—but birds, life, song.

  The girl stared down into her upturned hands. “I didn’t tell you about Maggie because I figured you wouldn’t help me. You wouldn’t want to become involved in my personal, whatever you call it—okay, my private fucking obsession. You’d probably tell me to leave you alone. The search for my mother had unhinged me: Consequently I was reading too many wild things into a photograph. You wouldn’t have listened to me, would you? I was just some young bimbo up from the city pathetically chasing a ghost. You wouldn’t have time for me.”

  “So you edited it,” Tennant said.

  “I edited it.”

  F
ind the lady, Tennant thought. What you see is what you get. “How convenient I was facing a drug rap.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. That was pure coincidence.”

  “Yeah, but you used the situation, Alison.”

  “Okay. I used it. I’m sorry.”

  “And how convenient I had no goddamn memory. Harry Tennant, a criminal, a blank page. Let’s fill in the gaps, Harry. Let’s hunt the big white whale of the past, Harry. Let’s harpoon that sorry sonofabitch.”

  Alison looked at him sadly. “I wanted to find my mother, goddamit. That makes sense, doesn’t it? I was desperate, Harry. I didn’t set out to uncover all the other shit. I wasn’t expecting dead kids and lost memories. And I didn’t mean to drag you into anything like this. How could I have known where it was going to lead? How?”

  Tennant stuffed his hands in his pockets. She wanted to find her mother, he thought. And so did I. So God help me did I.

  He stared up at the vaulted glass roof. Ribbons of condensation slid down the panes and dripped into deep foliage. He thought of the chalet again, the way he’d held the girl even as he called her by her mother’s name. He shook his head. Connections he didn’t want to make. Thickets of the past, entanglements that threatened to choke him. He stared at the roof. Rain fell on glass.

  “I don’t need to think this through,” he said. “You and me. Maggie and me.”

  “I understand. But you must understand this: I didn’t know, and you didn’t know.”

  “So that makes us innocent?”

  “It doesn’t make us guilty.”

  Tennant said, “I don’t care about innocent or guilty. I just don’t like the idea of sitting here trying to do calculations in my head. Your birthday. The last time I saw Maggie. I don’t need the arithmetic of all that. I don’t want to think about it. What good would it do you or me?”

  A kid. A daughter. Was she all he had left of Maggie Silver? The question shocked and depressed him. And yet there was some mild undercurrent in him he didn’t want to explore right then: some muted sense of—what?—having reclaimed a lost part of himself. But then he was back in the chalet again, and the vague feeling that had lifted him turned bleak. I don’t need to know, he thought. I don’t need the burden of proof. I don’t want evidence. Maggie Silver might have been unfaithful. Another lover. But he didn’t want to believe that any more than he wanted to entertain the idea Alison might be the hapless offspring of a fated liaison between himself and a woman totally lost to him. So which way do you go, Tennant?

  “There’s a name for this,” he said.

  “Forget the name—”

  “It runs around and around inside my head, Alison.”

  “And you feel what? Disgusted?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word. I don’t know what the word is. This isn’t one of your everyday situations, is it?” He saw her stand beside the bed, saw the tight bare breasts, the triangle of underwear, heard the way she’d said, Take them off. He remembered sliding them from her hips and the sensation of her flesh under his fingertips. Alison, Maggie, one and the same. You once loved the mother, and you still do.

  And now the daughter. The daughter.

  She asked, “Suppose we’d never found out? Suppose we’d gone on without discovering Maggie? We’d go deeper and deeper, Harry. You and me. We’d have gone on. We’d have been together. I feel that. I know that. If we hadn’t found Maggie, we’d never have known, would we? And if we’d never known, and if we survived all this …” She gestured around the conservatory as if the foliage itself were the enemy. “We’d have tried somehow to stay together.”

  Yes, he thought. We might have tried. We might have amounted to something. Alison and Harry, a couple, going on blindly into the sunset. Sheer happiness.

  Hunched in his overcoat he studied the massive leaf of the philodendron in front of him. He considered the vast mystery of the plant. Controlled and yet finally untrammeled, it forced its way up toward the glass roof, and when it could grow no further it coiled back in on itself, twisting, twining, as if intent on devouring itself. He had the urge to move now, to pick up his bag from the bench and walk.

  “I’ve never been happy with hypothesis. What do we really know anyway? We can’t be sure of anything. Leave it that way.” But you do know, Harry. If the child hadn’t been his, would Maggie Silver have been allowed to live? Rayland’s granddaughter. Your own daughter. Maggie Silver had been protected too. She’d had her life taken away, sure, but she’d been spared because of the child. He felt an enormous sadness. He was being pulled this way and that, with no more control over his responses than an object adrift on a rough tide. Too many strands here, too many blood echoes he hadn’t known existed. Breakdown. Collapse. Systems unraveling.

  Alison covered the back of his hand with her own. “It doesn’t disgust me, Harry. That’s not where it leaves me. Sad, sure. More sad than you’ll ever know. Because we can’t be. Because we don’t have a future of the kind we might have considered. But disgust, no, I don’t feel anything like that.”

  He enjoyed her touch a moment, even the small contrary stirring of godforsaken desire he felt, before he took his hand away.

  She said, “We can still have something, Harry. We can still have some kind of love.”

  Love? The word had too many meanings, every one elusive. Did she love him as a lover? A father? What did it matter now? He was suffocating in this humid place. The past had betrayed him. The future was obscure. He looked at the girl and he thought: I can’t have you. But maybe I can have something else. Maybe I can still have Harry Tennant.

  Grabbing his bag, he stood up.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. Walk away. Do what you have to do on your own. Leave this child out of it. She came after him, tugging at his sleeve. Outside the conservatory, where rain drizzled among the trees, he stopped.

  “You don’t walk out on me, Harry. No matter what.”

  He said nothing.

  “I have every right to go wherever you’re going,” she said.

  What had Rayland said? Would you want to see her damaged?

  “You can’t leave me now, Harry.”

  “Wait here. I’ll come back for you.”

  “Screw it. I go where you go.”

  He shook his head, but he already knew the depths of her determination, he already knew he had lost the conflict before it had even begun in earnest.

  “Don’t do this to me,” she said. “I won’t put up with it, Harry. I’m in this with you. All the way.”

  He started to walk in the direction of the street. She followed. All the way, no matter where. On the sidewalk he scanned traffic for a taxicab. When one finally arrived through the rain, Tennant opened the door and the girl skipped inside before him. She was impossible to restrict. How could he even begin to try?

  He told the driver Chinatown and sat back, his eyes closed.

  Chinatown. Where Obe had clicked his camera. Where a crowd had gathered more than twenty years ago outside St. Mary’s Church. Where the roots of treachery and murder lay. Where a child, a girl, was already forming in Maggie Silver’s body.

  It was no longer raining by the time the cab dropped them at the intersection of Grant and California. A watery sun hung in the sky, and dark clouds, blown by a breeze from the Bay, streamed above rooftops. Tennant stood on the corner and looked at St. Mary’s. A cable car crammed with a laughing tourist party clanged past. Smiling people hung precariously to handrails.

  He walked past the church a little way, past the place where Sammy Obe had taken his photographs, down into Chinatown. Alison was keeping up with him. He stopped outside a souvenir shop whose window displayed silk robes and kites and chairs made out of bamboo. A Chinese woman stood in the doorway and regarded him with mild interest.

  I came this way with Maggie, he thought. To buy opium. And then a chance encounter with Sammy Obe. A group shot, quickly assembled. Gimme a knowing look, kids. Gimme
the kinda look that says you know something your parents wouldn’t begin to dream about. Yeah yeah yeah that’s it that’s better. He’d plotted their positions, making Carlos stand here, Bear Sajac there, Maggie in the dead center. Quit giggling, kid. I want this picture to be kinda solemn. I want you all to look wise. Tennant pressed his forehead against the window of the store. To look wise. He remembered Obe’s hands on his body, pushing him into place. This is a composition, kids, this isn’t some kinda souvenir shot you send your granny. Gimme the look, gimme the look!

  Yes. The look.

  Tennant stepped back from the glass as if electrified.

  “What is it, Harry?” the girl asked.

  He hurried back to the street corner and faced the church from the exact position in which Obe had taken his photograph and he said, “There was this crowd outside the church. They just seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute there was nothing, the next, guys in dark suits, then after that, a small bunch of people began to assemble.”

  “Why?”

  Why? Why, Harry? Tell her. Tell the child. This child. He frowned. A light was burning in the church bookshop. The door to the church was open. A man stood there in shadow, motionless. He raised a hand to his face, touched the side of his scalp as if adjusting his hair, then he moved slightly, deeper into shadow.

  “The crowd, Harry. You were saying something about a crowd.”

  Yes, he thought. He kept his eyes fixed on the open door. The figure was very still now.

  “Harry,” the girl said.

  “We stood here,” he said. “Maggie and me and the others. Right here. Obe had his camera—”

  “And what happened?”

  “Somebody came out of the church.”

  “Tell me who.”

  He lapsed into dumb silence because he was back more than twenty years ago and he was looking at people emerging from St. Mary’s. “The guys in the suits were security people,” he said.