The Second Sight, page 2
“It’s over.”
“You mean you’ve separated? In your condition?”
“It’s not his fault.”
“What difference does that make? Look at you. When did you and Paul separate?”
“This morning, just before I sent you the telegram,” Cathy said. “Maria, please leave me alone.”
Another plane took off, trailing vapor. The stench of burnt kerosene seeped into the car. Cathy realized that she had smelled this same odor in Rome as she turned away from Christopher for the last time and walked to her airplane. She felt tears on her cheeks.
Maria said, “Why did you come here—to us, of all people?”
“I can’t let my parents or anyone see me like this. I needed a place to hide.”
“Why here, why us? I don’t understand. Did Paul suggest this?” “No.”
“Are you sure? Why don’t you have any baggage?”
“I didn’t want any,” Cathy said. “And now I don’t want to be here. Take me back to the airport.”
Maria’s expression, which had been cold and hard, changed. She plucked a tissue out of a box between the seats and handed it to Cathy.
“Sorry,” she said. “Give me a minute to calm down.”
Like Christopher, Maria was a spy. Or had been a spy—there had been some trouble, someone in Germany had been betrayed, killed before Christopher’s eyes, and Christopher had found out that Maria and her husband, a disdainful White Russian years older than she was, were responsible somehow. The Rothchilds had lost their jobs; they had been forced to leave Paris. They blamed Christopher for these consequences.
Maria put the car in gear. “Never mind,” she said. “I’m a worse bitch than usual these days. Living without money does that to you. Come on, I’ll take you home. We’ll get you fixed up. Otto’s an expert on Swiss doctors.”
She had the car in motion now, backing into a driveway, turning around, changing gears, dominating the machine. She was a superb driver.
“Are you and Paul really through?” she asked, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror as she accelerated into traffic on the main airport road.
“Yes,” Cathy replied.
“And whatever happened to you is not Paul’s fault?” Maria asked.
“No. Not any of it.”
“Nothing ever is,” Maria said. “Welcome to the world of basket cases.”
3
NOT SO LONG AGO, IN PARIS, THE ROTHCHILDS HAD LIVED ON THE prow of the Ile Saint-Louis in a magnificent apartment filled with works of art. Their new place outside Geneva, a half-timbered farmhouse on a slope overlooking Lake Leman, was attached to a barn that was still used to store grain. On her first night, Cathy heard rats by the hundreds scampering across the plank flooring above her bedroom.
“That’s why the farmer built himself a new house,” Otto Rothchild told her the next morning. “He got married and his wife was afraid the rats would smell milk on her baby’s breath and devour it in the night.”
“God bless the rats,” Maria said. “Nobody wants this place. The rent is only three hundred francs a month.”
They were having breakfast in the garden. It did not go with the peasant house. It was quite large and strangely formal, with flower beds and shrubbery laid out between graveled walks, in the French style. Two little fountains, covered with moss, tinkled quietly. Otto had his tea in a glass; he placed a lump of sugar in his mouth and drank through the sugar, Russian style. His skin was the color of parchment, and he wore other shades of brown—a tweed jacket, a tan foulard ascot, suede shoes—to accentuate his complexion. Everything was freshly brushed, including his gray hair, which grew straight back from his sloping forehead.
Cathy knew that Maria had brushed his clothes and his hair, shaved him, and arranged him in his chair before she, Cathy, came downstairs. A couple of years before, the nerves along Otto’s spine had been severed in an operation to control his alarmingly high blood pressure. Afterward he was able to do very little for himself.
Now Maria broke his orange into segments and arranged them prettily on his plate. His chair was placed so that he had the best view of the lake and the main range of the Alps beyond it. For Cathy’s benefit, he named the major peaks from left to right: Dents du Midi, Aiguille Vert, Dru, Aiguilles de Chamonix.
“Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe, is just there, hidden in the mist, at two o’clock,” Otto said. “Before the age of automobile exhaust you could see it quite clearly. Byron saw it every morning when he woke up and looked out the window in the summer of 1815. It was visible to W. Somerset Maugham a century later when he was an amateur agent for the British Secret Service in Geneva. But now it rarely appears through the smog. In three months in this house, we’ve seen it twice.”
Cathy nodded to show her gratitude for this useless information. No fact was uninteresting to Otto; he memorized everything, an incurable habit that went with his former profession. While Cathy ate her bread and jam he recited the month and year of her birth, her parents’ names and nicknames (Eleazer and Letitia, both called Lee; they were cousins from Kentucky who had the same surname, Kirkpatrick, even before they were married) and the name of a thoroughbred filly, Mean Irene, that the Kirkpatricks used to own. He had won a thousand French francs on her at Auteuil five years before.
“Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just up the lake, you know, when she and Shelley were cohabiting with Byron and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont,” Otto said. “Shelley adored communal sex--many poets do. Mary was the artist. Shelley was just another romantic pamphleteer. Propagandists never last. It’s the Mary Shelleys, the simple storytellers, who live on. Everyone knows Frankenstein, but who remembers a line of Queen Mab?”
“I wonder if the Shelleys had rats,” Maria said. “Imagine creeping from bed to bed and stepping on one.”
When Maria was in the presence of her husband she strove to be intelligent and amusing. He smiled indulgently at her and finished his lecture. “Madame de Staël lived not far away from here,” he said. “And much later, Jung, also. He is the most interesting of the psychiatric fortune-tellers because he actually believed in psycho-analysis. Freud was just a struggling young quack looking for a gimmick.”
“Otto knew them both,” Maria said.
“Did he?” Cathy said.
There was hardly anyone famous in Europe whom Otto did not know. The Klee hanging in the sitting room had been given to him by Klee; he dictated notes in sardonic French to André Malraux, sent clippings from German newspapers to Bertolt Brecht.
A small white paddle-wheel boat, followed by a flock of gulls, passed over the gray surface of the lake. Cathy watched it out of sight.
“Poor Cathy,” Otto said. “Maria says you fell off a motorbike. Did you break any bones?”
“Only in my face,” Cathy said. “And they took out my spleen.” She removed her sunglasses and returned Otto’s stare. “I’ve been dying to ask you—what does a spleen do? The doctors didn’t tell me. All the way up on the plane I kept saying to myself, ‘Otto will know.’ “
“It filters the blood. Don’t worry. You can easily live without it.” He looked at Maria, resentfully. “You didn’t tell me this detail.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard it,” Maria said. “How long ago did this accident happen?”
“I’m not sure, I’ve lost track of time,” Cathy said. “About six weeks ago, I think.”
Otto lifted a finger. Maria removed the cozy from the pot and poured him a second glass of tea. He placed another lump of sugar in his mouth and drank.
“Where was your husband while all this was happening?” he asked.
“With me.”
“Even during the accident? Was he driving the motorcycle?”
“No. He came right afterward and took care of me.”
“So Paul took care of you,” Otto said, “but then, as soon as you were on your feet, he deserted you.”
“He didn’t desert me. We knew that everything was over between us long before I got hurt. He stayed with me anyway.”
Maria said, “For old times’ sake.”
“Maria,” Cathy said, “you really are a shit. You always were. Do you know that?”
Otto looked from one young woman to the other. “Please,” he said. “Be pleasant. Maria, give Cathy some more coffee.”
Cathy put her hand over her cup. “I think I’ll take a walk in the garden,” she said.
“Wait,” Otto said. “You’re welcome here, Cathy. I hope you’ll stay a long time. But first I have to ask you about Paul. We have reason to be curious about him, too, you know, inasmuch as he ruined our lives. If we get this subject out of the way on the first morning, we’ll never have to speak of it again. Otherwise we’ll all be wondering and whispering and we’ll never relax.”
Cathy, still angry at Maria, averted her eyes for a long moment, gazing across the gray lake at the mountains.
“All right, Otto,” she said at last. “What do you want to know?”
“Why did you separate? It can’t be because you don’t love him.”
“That’s right. Nobody can ever stop loving Paul. Not even you.”
“Then why?”
“You want a simple answer? Because I hate secrets.”
“Perhaps it was a mistake to marry a spy, then.”
“Very few people know that until they marry one. That wasn’t the problem. I could have gotten used to the absences, the phone ringing at midnight and Paul vanishing into Africa or Asia for weeks at a time. It was him, the way he is, the way God made him. He’s absent. He won’t let anyone know him. He might as well be from another planet, I used to tell him that. He doesn’t know the meaning of jealousy.”
“But you do.”
“Oh, yes.”
“You don’t actually think that he was unfaithful to you?”
“Why not? He wasn’t a virgin when we got married. Women adore him.”
Otto frowned and waved a finger. “I can tell you categorically that adultery was impossible for Paul Christopher,” he said.
“You can?” Cathy replied. “How do you know? Did you have him followed?”
“Sometimes.”
“He’d know if he was followed.”
“Yes, he would,” Otto said. “But that’s not what I mean. I’ve known him since childhood, you know.”
“He never told me that.”
Otto lifted his eyebrows. “I’m not sure he remembers,” he said. “He had a remarkable mother, a German. He looks just like her. But morally, he’s like his father—American, crazy virtuous, crazy brave. Dangerous.”
Cathy started to ask a question: What is that supposed to mean? But Otto had closed his eyes and stopped talking. He was so perfectly still that she thought that he might have died. She gave Maria a questioning look.
“He’s fallen asleep,” Maria said. “He does that—drops off. It’s a side effect of his surgery. I hope you’ll stay. Otto really does like you, and we’re expecting another guest—someone you’ll like.”
“Not a spy,” Cathy said. “I don’t want to know any more spies.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place. They avoid us like the plague these days. No, she’s something better—she can see into the future.”
“You mean she’s got second sight?”
“What’s that?” Maria was often confused by Cathy’s speech; at school she had such a Southern accent that she had to spell the numbers to the operator when she wanted to call home.
Cathy said, “It’s Southern for clairvoyant. My Mammy had it, lots of black people do.”
“I’m not talking about telling fortunes.”
“Neither am I. Mammy could see into the past and the future, and when her son Harold was away in the Battle of the Bulge she saw him driving his truck without headlights. ‘Slow down, Harold!’ she’d cry while peeling potatoes or washing clothes. ‘Turn on your headlights, y’hear?’ You could hear her all over the house.”
“Did he?”
“Harold said so when he came home. Anyway he didn’t have a wreck and get killed like Mammy was afraid he would.” “And what did you call this gift she had?”
“Second sight.”
“It sounds like a primitive form of what Lla Kahina has,” Maria said. “But she’s the real thing.”
“So was Mammy,” Cathy said. “Not like Freud and Jung and that crowd.”
4
THE WOMAN WHO ARRIVED WITH MARIA FROM THE TRAIN STATION that afternoon was swathed in black—black dress, black stockings, a broad-brimmed black hat, and a great deal of gold jewelry: necklaces, earrings, bracelets, a beautiful filigree belt. The dress was elegant, obviously made in Paris, but she had sewn a row of purple tassels on its hem. She was small, less than five feet high, and very thin. Under the hat Cathy glimpsed a magnificent hooked nose and a mouth that was still sensual even though she must have been sixty years old.
Otto had been waiting impatiently for her arrival.
“Lla Kahina!” he cried when she appeared. “Come here and kiss me!”
“La Kahina?” Cathy said to Maria. “What is she, a soprano?”
“It’s double ‘I,’ pronounced like ‘Ella’ without the ‘E,’ “ Maria replied, whispering. “L-LA Kaheena. She’s a Berber. It’s a term of respect for women of rank, like ‘Lady Kahina.’ “
“Oh. She looks like that picture of Isak Dinesen on the back of Winter’s Tales. But why does she wear all those purple tassels?”
“Ssshhh,” Maria replied. She seemed to be overcome by respect; this was a side of Maria Cathy had never seen before.
Otto introduced them.
“Not a relation of Hubbard Christopher?” Lla Kahina said.
“I’m married to his son,” Cathy said.
Lla Kahina looked at her closely. “Really?”
“No,” Cathy said. “Not really. We’re being divorced.”
“That’s too bad,” Lla Kahina said. “He comes from a very good family.”
“You know the family?”
“I did, years ago, when they were young.”
“Oh? Where?”
“In Berlin. They were the happiest people I ever knew.”
Lla Kahina smiled, showing even, white teeth. She was much fairer than Cathy would have expected someone from Africa to be. The creamy skin of her face had been tattooed with a small tear-drop beneath each eye.
“Maria, you and Cathy run along,” Otto said. “I want to be alone with my friend.”
Lla Kahina and Cathy shared the only guest bedroom. After spending the whole afternoon with Otto, Lla Kahina retired immediately after dinner. By the time Cathy came upstairs she was sound asleep in the other twin bed, her small body scarcely visible beneath the covers. Cathy herself fell asleep almost instantaneously, but woke after an hour or two, puzzled by the silence. She lay awake for a long time before she realized that the rats had stopped scampering over the plank floor upstairs.
All during the second day, Cathy was aware that Lla Kahina was looking at her. She would glance up from a book or turn away from a window and find her staring. The old woman had brilliantly intelligent, unwavering green eyes.
Finally Cathy said, in French, “Can I help you, Madame?”
Lla Kahina replied in English. “Thank you, I’m quite happy as I am.”
Cathy took a novel into the garden. Cathy was soon absorbed by the story. When she closed the book hours later and looked up, she saw that Lla Kahina was sitting in another garden chair, still staring at her.
That night, when Cathy went upstairs, she found the old woman sitting at a table, playing solitaire by candlelight.
“Sit there, please,” she said, pointing to a chair on the opposite side of the table.
“What for?”
“I am going to do a reading for you.”
“You mean tell my fortune?”
“Switch off the lamp,” Lla Kahina said. “Electricity is bad for the cards.”
Cathy did as she was told. It was raining outside, and beyond Lla Kahina’s shoulder the windowpane glistened in the candlelight.
“Do you do the past, too,” Cathy asked, “or just the future? I knew someone when I was growing up who had second sight. She used tea leaves like you use cards. She called the past ‘black and white’ and the future ‘color.’ She’d say, ‘Do you want black and white or color?’ “
“Which did you choose?”
“Both, naturally.”
“One is always stronger than the other. In your case, the future will be dominant.”
“How can you tell before you even start?”
“But I have started,” Lla Kahina said. “I’ve been seeing you in the cards for a long time. I just didn’t know who you were.”
She used ordinary playing cards, a garish French bridge deck. Following her instructions, Cathy shuffled the cards, then cut them into four stacks arranged in the shape of a diamond. Lla Kahina chose cards, three at a time, from the stacks.
“You grew up among horses,” she said, looking at the first cards she drew.
Cathy nodded. Everybody knew that.
More cards. “You have been injured, badly, twice in your life—the wounds you have now, and when you fell off a black horse as a girl and broke a bone. A man, a relation but not an American, carried you home on his horse. He was a beautiful rider. You fell in love with him, but you were too young to do anything about it.”
All this was true in every detail, but Cathy had often told this story; Maria probably knew it. She smiled. “All correct except the part about falling in love.”
Lla Kahina looked at the cards. “It is quite clear that you fell in love with this man. Maybe you don’t remember.”
Cathy had had a crush on the man who carried her home when she broke her leg during a hunt on her thirteenth birthday—Don Jorge de Rodegas, a Spaniard who was a distant cousin of the Kirkpatricks.
“All right, I remember,” Cathy said. “It was puppy love.”
“You and this man are connected by a queen,” Lla Kahina said, looking at new cards. “He has a picture of her in his house which looks like you, or which he says looks like you. Is that so?”
