The Second Sight, page 15
Patchen told him Martha’s story. The anthropologist listened intently, asking many questions in a rumbling Central European accent and scribbling down Patchen’s sketchy answers on large file cards that he retrieved from an inside pocket.
“What notes, exactly, do these Indians play on the marimba?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Patchen replied. “My source doesn’t read music.” “But one must! Otherwise what is the point? The skills must go with the field worker! They cannot be acquired in situ!” “No doubt. But that was not the mission.”
Patchen did not reveal that Martha was his wife, and the expert naturally assumed that she was an agent sent on some bizarre secret mission that had no intelligent purpose and was unlikely to produce any result that a sane person could regard as useful.
“Do you have an opinion about the Indians’ behavior?” Patchen asked.
“Which aspect of it?”
“The shunning, the refusal to make eye contact, the vanishing act when they all left the village.”
“It’s quite obvious,” the anthropologist said. “These people think your friend is possessed of the evil eye; that is why they touch the children on the scalp before they look at them to dispel its power. They think the evil eye, his evil eye, is causing all these accidents, these calamities, flags sewed to fingers, bicycle crashes, et cetera. Did that not occur to him?”
“It’s a her,” Patchen said. “Apparently not. Are they likely to harm her?”
“They harm her? That’s a good one.”
Patchen persisted. “Is she safe in that village?” he asked.
“As long as she stays out of the way of falling bicycles. But she should try to get a little education before she blunders into another situation.”
Patchen did not repeat this advice to Martha, or tell her about the anthropologist’s suggestion concerning the evil eye. She was incapable of believing such things.
“Thee will not be angry if I go back again?” she asked.
“No. But what’s the point? They won’t have anything to do with you.”
“That is the point. If I stop now, the good that I was called to do may not be done.”
“And if you go back what will happen?” Patchen asked. “Perhaps I will be noticed.”
“By whom? The Indians seem to know you’re there.”
She kissed him. They were in bed. “I’m not talking about the Indians,” she said.
“Then who are you talking about?”
Her face was suffused with a smile of deep contentment; at that moment Patchen loved her with all his heart: her simplicity, her goodness, her obliviousness to the world as it really was and to the evidence before her eyes.
“Thee knows Who,” she said.
5
PATCHEN’S MOTHER DIED, IN HER SLEEP, OF AN ANEURYSM, WHILE Martha was in Guatemala and Christopher was in Vietnam. His grandfather, the judge, had her body cremated before Patchen arrived in Ohio.
“It was her wish; nobody else in the family has ever done such a thing, but I suppose it had something to do with this,” the judge said, handing Patchen a shoe box containing the photographs of his father in their silver frames, the wedding and birth certificates he had been invited to examine so many times, and his mother’s wedding ring engraved with her initials and those of Captain David Alan St. Clair Patchen, R. F. C., engraved inside. As she had often explained, her husband had so many initials that there had been no room on the circlet for the date of their wedding, July 12, 1918. The judge inserted an oblong pasteboard envelope into the shoe box. “You may take anything else you want that belonged to your mother.”
The oblong envelope contained an insurance policy on his mother’s life for twenty thousand dollars. Patchen was the sole beneficiary; his mother had designated the American Red Cross as secondary beneficiary in case her son predeceased her—which, of course, he nearly had.
The room was very large and was fitted out as a boudoir, with the bed and dressers in one corner and a sofa and chairs in the other, arranged around a blue Belgian rug. It seemed forlorn without the shrine to Patchen’s father, but he did not set up the photographs and framed decorations again. The drawn window shades glowed like parchment in the afternoon sun. He opened the closet; his mother’s dresses, muted plaids and prints and polka dots, all in shades of gray and dark blue, hung on their padded hangers; her Red Cross shoes, laced and low-heeled, stood in a row; her white, long-skirted Red Cross nurse’s uniform with its blue cape, lined in red, with the impressive enamel badge of her training hospital pinned to the collar, hung in a transparent plastic bag. The closet smelled of rose leaves; his mother had collected roses after they died, laid them in the sun to dry, plucked the dehydrated leaves, which retained their original brilliant colors and looked and rustled like dead insects, and sewn them into cheese cloth pouches for her closets and bureau drawers.
Holding the shoe box on his lap, he went through her souvenirs one by one, thinking that she might have left a letter for him, but there was no posthumous message. His curiosity about his father was overwhelming. Was there some piece of evidence concealed somewhere in this room? After all, his mother had died before she knew what was happening, so she would have had no time to conceal it. He paced the parquet floor, looking with a new and knowing eye at likely hiding places. If evidence existed, he knew that he could find it. The Outfit had trained him; he knew where to look and how to look. Had something been taped to the back of a dresser drawer? slipped between the rug and its pad? inserted into the pages of a book? sewn into a mattress? folded very small and jammed into the toe of a shoe? buried in the Chinese jar among the rose petals?
He started to open a dresser drawer, into which he had never looked, but closed it again before it had moved more than an inch on its guides. His mother had died in this room where she had spent twenty-five years recovering from her one night of love. He did not want to catch his mother in a lie now, any more than he had wished to do so when she was alive.
That evening he dined with his grandfather. Bunches of oak grapes decorated the table, the sideboard, the plate shelf that ran around the walls. The house was a vast red-brick Victorian structure, turreted and gingerbreaded, with every room trimmed in a different kind of polished wood, with furniture to match. His grandfather called the dining room the Oak Room, the parlor the Cherry Room, his study the Walnut Room. His grandfather had never treated him as a child, much less as a grandson: no rough rubbing of the head, no trips to Cleveland to see the Indians play, no quarters or half-dollars pressed into his small hand. Patchen called him “Judge”; he called Patchen “Young Fellow.” The old man had treated Patchen courteously, even kindly, as if he were• an uninvited guest who would sooner or later realize that it would be better to leave.
The judge was a Quaker, but in name only; he believed in the death penalty. It put him in a good ‘mood to mete it out, and he always drank a glass of bourbon before dinner on days when he had sent someone to the electric chair; Patchen never smelled liquor on another man’s breath without thinking about capital punishment, and he did not drink spirits himself until he was in his forties. The judge had approved of Patchen’s joining the Marines, calling him into his study, which resembled a courtroom with its massive desk and somber woodwork and its rows of leatherbound books, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good lad!” he said. “No matter what your mother may tell you, a man has to fight for his country or he’s no damn good.” The judge took up swearing—”damn” and “hell” and “little yellow bastards”—for the duration of the war, but gave it up as soon as the Japanese surrendered.
After finishing his plate of boiled beef and vegetables the judge Said, “You know, your grandmother died of the same thing, aneurysm in the night. Hard to imagine a better death, but it’s an old person’s death. They were both young. Too young. It’s something to think about if you believe in heredity.”
He was a believer in eugenics, a popular theory that argued the superiority of some ethnic and racial groups over others and defended the necessity of maintaining such superiority by careful selection of mates from suitable breeding stock.
That night Patchen slept in his old room. Like the rest of the house it was kept absolutely free of dust by female inmates of the county jail who did the housework. Even the tissue-paper wings and fuselage of the model Sopwith Camel Patchen had made at age nine were spick and span. So were all his books: Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood, William Allen White. As a boy Patchen had imagined himself a hunter and trapper, alone except for his horse and dog in the Rocky Mountains or on the frozen tundra above the Great Bear Lake in Canada. He had wanted to live among the Indians, with an Indian name and an Indian wife; before he went to sleep in these surroundings he realized why he understood Martha’s passion for her Indians.
The funeral was a Quaker one, with no eulogist or minister. An urn containing the ashes of the deceased rested on the table. Because of the judge’s high position, the funeral home was crowded. Finally the judge’s old law partner, now a state senator, rose and spoke at length about the deceased, dwelling on her brave service in France and the tragic circumstances of her marriage. “Here lies one of our own, a heroine who fell in love with a hero and gave birth to a hero son!” the senator said. His words released some pent-up tension in the mourners. A collective sigh whispered through the room. Many looked at Patchen; women wept, men cleared their throats. Afterward many of them told him how much they had admired his mother. Looking into their remorseful faces, he realized that his wounds somehow made it impossible for anyone in town to doubt that his mother’s story had been true.
The next morning Patchen packed his bag and went to the courthouse to say goodbye to his grandfather. The judge was trying a case of incest, and Patchen, leaving his suitcase in his chambers, took a seat in the courtroom and watched the proceeding. The defendant, an emigrant from Kentucky, was found guilty of having carnal knowledge of his fourteen-year-old daughter. Before sentence was passed, the man’s wife, who was also the victim’s mother, asked for permission to address the court. “She’s his, Your Honor,” she said. “She belongs to him. She knows that, I know that, you know that. The only reason she told the sheriff on him was because she was mad just because he drunk a few beers down to Pondi’s and didn’t have no money left to buy her this hat with Mickey Mouse ears she thought she had to have to wear to watch TV. That’s all there was to it, Your Honor, spite. And that’s the truth.”
The judge sentenced the man to serve five to seven years in the state penitentiary and remanded the daughter into the custody of the county orphanage. Afterward, in his chambers, the old man said, “The trash just don’t understand, David; it’s in the blood, nothing can change the way they are.”
“Well, Grandfather, goodbye,” Patchen said.
“Goodbye, young fellow.” His grandfather was still wearing his black judicial robes. “Got everything?”
“I think so,” Patchen replied. “I took Mother’s Chinese jar, the one with the rose petals in it. And her ashes.”
“Did you now? I guess that’s all right.”
Patchen used the insurance money, a vast sum (the judge’s house with its beautiful woodwork had cost four thousand dollars to build only forty years earlier), to paint his house and enlarge and paper the rooms. He had learned about antiques in order to monitor the overt business transactions of an antique shop the 0. G. set up as a meeting place and dead drop for Balkan exiles, and he applied this knowledge to buy American versions of eighteenth-century English furniture, as well as some inexpensive still-life paintings by a for gotten American artist called Raphaelle Peale.
“How do you like the house?” he asked Martha when she came back from Guatemala the following spring.
“Thee has made it very worldly,” she replied. “But I like the pictures of the fruit. It looks real enough to eat.”
6
DURING HIS NIGHTTIME WALKS THROUGH THE CITY, PATCHEN OFTEN had the feeling that he was not alone. He had no evidence that this was so. Despite his training, he never detected anyone following him, and he certainly felt no fear. Postwar Washington was a law-abiding city almost to the point of farce: during the lunch hour, government workers stood on the curb along Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting for the WALK sign to flash even though no moving car was in sight for blocks in either direction. If someone jaywalked, the others would follow like sheep, but in the absence of a leader, they would wait patiently for the machine to tell them what to do. One day Patchen saw a herd of pedestrians being helped across the street by a policeman who held up his hand to stop invisible traffic, blew his whistle, and put them in motion with another hand signal: the WALK sign was broken, and they had waited obediently to be rescued.
This behavior interested Patchen, and he described it later to the O. G.. “Maybe we should get the psychologists to study pedestrian behavior in various foreign cities,” he said.
Ordinarily the O. G. loved ideas of this kind; human eccentricities were his passion. But he didn’t like this one.
“All mammals like to be in big groups with everybody heading in the same direction and eating the same kind of grass,” he said. “Man is no exception. We already know that. We’re not interested in the herd—that’s politicians’ business. Our animal is the maverick, God bless him.”
“Do you remember what you said to me in Boston about the game of baseball and the English sonnet?” Patchen asked.
“About their being the only perfect systems ever devised by man?” the O. G. replied. “You bet. That’s the Shakespearean abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet I was talking about, not all that other pap that doesn’t rhyme.”
“Is that what you’re trying to create here, Sir? Do you want the Outfit to be the third such system?”
The O. G. jumped a little in his surprise, then threw back his head and laugh.
“By golly, Son,” he said, “you’re really something. I never thought of it that way, but I guess maybe that is what I’m trying to do around here. Let’s just keep it between you and me.”
His pince-nez flashed in the artificial light. The O. G. had come into Patchen’s cell at the end of the day to return the files he had been working on to the vault. The stifling room was now brilliantly lit by buzzing fluorescent lights that covered the entire ceiling. In the glare from overhead, the O. G.’s skin lost its usual pink hue and his hair appeared to be several shades whiter than usual.
With his single eye, Patchen read hundreds of pages of reports, dispatches, and cables every day, then digested them for the O. G. Accomplishing this task by the light of the original gooseneck lamp had given him piercing headaches and nagging anxiety about his eye; despite the Navy surgeon’s reassurances, he had never really believed that it would not eventually go blind. The appearance of the O. G., leached of most of his natural color, gave Patchen something else to think about: how he himself must look under this unnatural light. His visible wounds, and the impression they made on others, were never far from his mind.
“Meanwhile,” the O. G. said, “come into the other room for a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”
Patchen followed him through the door and saw Barney Wolkowicz standing in front of the fireplace, holding the leash of a large black and tan dog.
“Sorry to keep you, Barney,” the O. G. said. “We got to talking baseball. You two know each other, I think.”
“Yeah,” Wolkowicz answered in his raspy voice, nodding to Patchen. “Patchen and me dug up some skulls and bones together once.”
“Barney just flew in from Europe,” the O. G. said.
Wolkowicz looked as if he had been traveling for days instead of hours. His shirt was smudged at the collar and the tail was out; he had not shaved; his Tyrolean hat, with its plume of pheasant tail feathers and horsehair, dangled from his free hand. In his other hand he held the leash; at the end of it the dog sat absolutely motionless, gazing into space like a bored soldier assigned to orderly duty.
“That’s a beautiful dog,” Patchen said.
“Glad you like him,” Wolkowicz said.
“D’you recognize the breed?” the O. G. asked. He was fond of dogs, and sometimes brought his own elderly spaniel to work with him, where it slept peacefully in the kneehole of his desk.
Patchen said, “It’s a Doberman pinscher, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” the O. G. said. “Good work. Not many people know about Dobermans outside of Germany. Best war dogs in the world. Incredible fighting spirit, amazing jaw strength. What’s this one’s name, Barney?”
“Faust.”
“Crackerjack name. Think you can remember it, Son?” “Me?” Patchen said.
“Yep.” The O. G. was pleased with himself. “It’s yours,” he said. “Barney brought him from Berlin for you—I thought you’d appreciate company on your walks through the night.”
7
OVER THE NEXT FEW NIGHTS WOLKOWICZ ACCOMPANIED PATCHEN ON his walks and taught him how to control the Doberman.
“He won’t sit up or roll over,” Wolkowicz explained. “He’s only got one trick—homicide.”
Otherwise the dog was perfectly trained: it would sit, heel, stay, come, or attack in instantaneous obedience to a command from its master. Patchen, who had never before owned an animal—his grandfather believed that unneeded food should be given to the poor, not to pets—was puzzled as to the reasons the O. G. had given him this one.
“Security reported you were wandering around by yourself at night,” Wolkowicz said. “I guess it worried the O. G. He thinks you need protection.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s picked you to be the all-seeing eye of the Outfit. If the other side grabbed you, they’d know damn near as much as he knows.”
“You think a dog would stop them?”
Wolkowicz looked him over. “You sure as hell wouldn’t be able to. C’mere.”
