The Second Sight, page 36
“Everyone says that. Why did she think he was a genius?”
“Because he was; if you’ve read his books you know that. You have to understand that he thought the Experiment was the cause of what happened to Lori, that he was responsible.”
“Responsible? How?”
Evening shadows filled the room. In the flickering light from the fireplace the O. G. suddenly looked very tired. “Not now,” he said.
“ ‘Not now’?” Zarah said. “How can you stop the story after making a statement like that?”
The O. G. lost his smile; he pointed a gnarled index finger at her chest; it was the color of a candle stub. “I can stop any time I want to, young lady,” he said testily. “I’ve gone too far as it is.”
Zarah’s large eyes, fixed expectantly on the O. G., did not waver. Just then a log fell in the andirons with a shower of sparks, and behind the O. G.’s head this sputtering image was multiplied in the rain-streaked diamond panes of a bow window.
“ ‘Gone too far’?” Zarah said. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’re a very good listener,” the O. G. replied, “and I’ve let myself be carried away. You’ve come here in the shape of another being. Half the time I think I’m talking to your grandmother, telling you things you already know.”
“Then what’s the objection?”
“You’re not Lori. You’re the Lorelei, mesmerizing me into telling you things you have no need to know.”
“No need to know? Nobody has ever had such a need to know as I do. Why won’t you tell me the rest?”
“What makes you think I know the rest?”
“You’re supposed to know everything.”
“Am I? Who says so?”
“Everyone.”
“Well, Everyone is wrong; Everyone almost always is. Remember that. I don’t know everything, and what I do know I only know up to a point. I left Berlin before the play was over, remember. There was supposed to be a different ending. Then your father came back and upset the applecart.”
“What applecart?”
“If Meryem has told you what she knows, you know more than I do.”
“All I know is what I overheard her telling Barney, years ago.”
The O. G. rose to his feet with a muffled groan, dismissing Zarah. “Did she mention a fellow named Dickie Shaw-Condon?” he asked, peering benevolently through the dusk at her. Zarah shook her head. “No?” he said. “Then you didn’t overhear everything. Has Meryem or anybody told you about the last time Paul saw his mother?”
Zarah said, “No.”
“Paul knew he was seeing her for the last time, that he was leaving her to her fate,” the O. G. said. “She wouldn’t let him cry, and she didn’t cry herself. Her last words to him were, ‘Control your face. They mustn’t make you feel anything. No goodbyes.’ Paul was fifteen years old. He never got over it. Not to this day.”
9
CHRISTOPHER AND ZARAH MET THE NEXT MORNING UNDER THE MARBLE dome of the National Gallery of Art. Zarah entered through the door that faced the Mall, stepping through its little rectangle of light into the rotunda. She took off her sunglasses, and as she accustomed her eyes to the churchly dimness of the place, she looked around her, taking in the rotunda’s enormous scale, its variety of stone and marble and granite, its central fountain surmounted by a bronze Mercury. She was precisely on time as usual. He was standing to her right, within the circle of mottled marble columns that support the dome, and she did not see him at once. She turned her head slowly from left to right, searching for him among the tourists in their bright vacation clothes, and when she caught sight of him a joyous expression of love rose to her face as if released from her very heart. In response Christopher’s chest filled up with the same emotion, and he smiled at her across the vast, noisy, crowded space.
Zarah came toward him through the crowd, but she did not return the smile. After greeting Christopher she stood somewhat farther away from him than usual; her face, usually so calm and alert, was drawn and anxious. As they walked across the rotunda together, he began to tell her about a certan portrait by Ingres that had always reminded him of Meryem. “I thought we’d look at that first, then at a Gainsborough that looks something like your mother at your age,” he said. “I wonder if you’ll see the resemblance, too. Probably not. I’ve reached the age where everyone reminds me of somebody else.”
He turned his head, meaning to say something else, but she interrupted him, something she had never done before.
“Can we sit down someplace?”she asked.
“Of course.”
Christopher led her down the long nave of the museum to the garden court at the east end of the building. It was quieter in this space. The tinkling of another, smaller fountain accentuated the stillness. They sat down side by side in garden chairs.
Zarah took his hand. Once again this was something she had never done before. “I’ve been talking to the O. G.”
Christopher, a little surprised by this abrupt change of subject, waited for her to go on.
“I like him,” Zarah said.
“Most people do. Watch out he doesn’t activate you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because that’s what he’s been doing to people all his life. He can’t break himself of the habit.”
“All he seems to want to talk about is my Christopher grandparents. Lori especially.”
Christopher waited again. He was like a priest in a novel by a convert, Zarah thought, relying on the power of one sin to remind the person in the confessional of another.
“He told me parts of the story I hadn’t heard before.” Knowing that Christopher, in his reluctance to interrogate, would not ask her to go on, she continued anyway, telling him everything she had overheard during Wolkowicz’s visit to Tifawt, and everything the O. G. had told her.
“The O. G. mentioned a name—Dickie Shaw-Condon,” she said, finally. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “He’s an Englishman. He was a friend of my father’s; he helped me out once. He must be very old now, if he’s alive.”
“I hope he is alive,” Zarah said, “because the O. G. said you couldn’t know the whole story about your mother unless you knew what this man knows.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t say any more himself.”
Christopher let go of her hand. It was an absent gesture; his thoughts were elsewhere. Where? Remembering what? Zarah did not ask. The two of them lapsed into a lengthy silence. The garden court, so called because ferns and other greenery grew in flower beds set into the marble floor, was a pleasant place to be; the fountain created the illusion that the dank refrigerated air was cooled by water running over stone instead of chemicals and machines. Zarah closed her eyes. Like her father, she was subject to rapid chains of thought that carried her in an instant through many years, many memories, and more than one language. In rapid succession she remembered everything that Lla Kahina and Wolkowicz and, only yesterday, the O. G., had told her about her grandmother.
“There are other things I haven’t told you,” Zarah said.
She opened her eyes. Christopher was looking at her; apparently he had been doing so for some time.
“You’ve told me enough for now,” he said. “I think that you and I had better go and see Meryem.”
10
STEPHANIE HAD A GROUP THERAPY SESSION THAT EVENING, AND AS soon as she came home she changed costumes and ran for two miles to relieve the stress that this induced. Consequently Christopher had no opportunity to describe his meeting with Zarah until Stephanie finished her shower and got into bed with him.
He had intended to leave any mention of the new clues to his mother’s fate until last, but Stephanie interrupted before he got to that part of the story. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you’re going to just take off for the Sahara Desert alone with that young woman?”
“Unless you want to join us,” Christopher replied.
Stephanie snorted disdainfully. “You know perfectly well I can’t leave my patients. Every hour of every working day is booked from now until February.”
As a result of her long run in the emissions-saturated air of Georgetown and the sudden emotion that showed so plainly in her face, Stephanie’s throat was dry. She had drunk all the water in the glass on her bedside table; she drank twelve eight-ounce glasses of water every day. Christopher offered her his own untouched glass of spring water, transported in plastic containers from an underground source in Maine. She waved it away and continued to clear her throat; there were tears in her eyes.
“Besides,” she said, “What are we supposed to do about Lori?”
“She can go, too. She’d love it.”
“She might, if she wasn’t taken hostage by the people who shot Cathy. We can’t just take her out of school for a month.”
“It wouldn’t be for a whole month. Anyway, what if it was? What would she miss?”
“A lot. She’s in an intensive fast-track curriculum. She’d never catch up. Not everybody is as free as a bird to come and go as they please, you know. Some people in this society, even little girls who want to get into a good college, lead ordinary, regular lives according to a schedule and their obligations.”
Coughing into her fist, Stephanie turned her eyes away, embarrassed that she had let these unkind words slip out. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Stephanie insisted on paying exactly half of their household expenses, exclusive of wine and spirits, of which she did not approve; and books, on which Christopher spent far more than the whole family spent on food; and their child’s tuition at a progressive private school, to which she could not afford to contribute and still buy all her own clothes. Although Stephanie insisted, as a matter of political conviction, that both partners in a marriage should have equal rights and responsibilities, another part of her nature caused her to resent the fact that she, the wife, went to work every day while Christopher, the husband, stayed at home. She knew that this was irrational, but there seemed to be nothing she could do about the anger it aroused in her. She understood, on the intellectual level, that this situation was not Christopher’s fault. He was unemployable, even by the Outfit; fortunately, he had no need to earn a living. The Outfit paid him the modest pension that had accrued during his years of hazardous service under deep cover, but his main income came from elsewhere. Sebastian Laux, as the executor of Hubbard Christopher’s will, had turned an estate of $78,000 into more than $1.5 million over a period of thirty years, including the decade that Christopher spent in jail. This capital sum, invested by the Bank in tax-free bonds and U. S. Treasury notes, yielded more money than Christopher needed to live on. Thanks to Sebastian, who had bought it in his absence as an investment for the estate, he owned the house they lived in outright. He was not idle, in fact he worked hard—harder, perhaps, than Stephanie, who did little but listen to her patients all day and give them standardized advice according to the category of personality disorder into which they fell; she accepted no dangerous lunatics for treatment, only educated middle class people who did not understand why they were less happy and less successful than they deserved to be. Like his father before him, on the other hand, Christopher rose early every morning and wrote for several hours. Unlike Hubbard, however, he did not publish what he wrote. He delivered his manuscripts, instead, to D. & D. Laux & Co. for safekeeping; as his literary executor, Stephanie would have the right to publish, or not publish, what he had written after his death.
“I’m sorry,” Stephanie said again. “I had no right to accuse you of being one of the idle rich.” Christopher smiled gently, a humorous light in his glance. “Don’t condescend,” she said.
“All right,” Christopher replied. “But getting back to Lori, ten seems a little young to be chained to a desk in the Ministry of Good Works.”
“Please don’t use Lori as a diversion. I want to discuss the real problem here, which is Zarah. It’s only been two weeks since she showed up, and everything has changed.”
“Stephanie, stop. Nothing has changed except that she’s taken her rightful place in the family. You say yourself that this wouldn’t be a factor if she were a male. She can’t help it if she’s a female; she can’t help it if she happens to resemble certain members of her own family.”
“Gender and resemblance are not the point. It’s not her looks that bother me, although God knows she’s every woman’s nightmare. It’s the way you look at her, as though a lover has come back to you from the grave. What are you remembering when she walks in?”
Christopher let several moments pass before he answered. Stephanie, who believed so strongly in the honest answer, and would settle for nothing less, did not always react to such answers happily. “Obviously she reminds me of my mother,” he said at last. “But your intuition, if that’s what it is, is correct—there’s more to it than that. She’s a lot like Molly. I don’t know how that can be, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. But it’s true.”
Stephanie gasped. “She’s like Molly? She reminds you of Molly? How can you say such a thing to me?”
They had never in all the years of their marriage mentioned Molly’s name. Everyone who remembered her, Stephanie’s mother and father in particular, said that she was the woman Christopher had really loved. Christopher himself had never denied this. While in prison he had written an immensely long poem, filled with tenderness and lust and the deep amusement that always accompanies true love, that could only be about Molly. His enemies had killed her as a means of punishing Christopher, but he did not know this until the Chinese let him go. Stephanie had been waiting for him. She had married him, healed him, and borne his child, and now, after all these years and all that had happened between them, he thought that Molly had come back from the dead as his own flesh and blood, made young and beautiful again.
“That was really heartless,” Stephanie said. “Go to Africa and be damned!”
She leaped out of bed, tumbling her unread biography of Castro onto the floor. Snatching up her pillow, she wrapped the light blanket from the foot of the bed around her naked body, as though she had just discovered that Christopher was not her husband, but someone who had been posing as her husband and had betrayed himself by falling disastrously out of character in the middle of the act of love. All this happened rapidly—Stephanie, lithe and mentally alert owing to her daily regimen of exercise and diet—was very quick in her movements, though a little clumsy. She knocked over the reading lamp as she ran out of the room, leaving Christopher by himself in the darkened room.
He fixed the lamp, then put on a robe and followed her downstairs. Still wrapped in her blanket, she was seated on a sofa in the long room. No lamps burned. He sat down beside her. In the faint wash of the streetlight coming through the front window she looked tousled and very young; Stephanie was a small woman, and in certain lights, while wearing certain clothes, and especially when she had been crying, she might have been mistaken for a schoolgirl. He touched her wet cheek. She turned her head away.
“I’m sorry to be behaving like this,” she said. “But this situation is very threatening. I’ve spent our whole marriage trying to persuade you to put the past behind you and live in the present, and now this person shows up and all you want to do is go back with her to wherever she comes from. You can’t change anything by going back, Paul.”
“I don’t imagine that I can, but at least I’ll know the truth.”
“Fuck the truth. On second thought, don’t. I’ll never get you back if you do.”
“That’s not very funny.”
“Not if the DNA test didn’t lie, it isn’t.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Stephanie,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better for everybody concerned if you stopped imagining that I’m going to fall in love with my own daughter?”
“I’m not the one who’s imagining things. It would be better for you if you acknowledged your own fantasies.”
They quarreled rarely; Christopher disliked it. He was seldom impatient with her, even more seldom outspoken because the consequences were so exhausting, but now he raised his voice.
“That’s a lot of psychobabble bullshit, Stephanie,” he said. “I don’t fantasize about Zarah; the reality is enough. If even that is too much for you, then we’ll find a way to work it out, but not at the expense of losing her again. I can’t help the memories I have. I collected them before you came into the picture. I’m an old man.”
“Like hell you are.”
He paid no attention. “You have no rivals. Cathy is dead, Molly is dead. I loved Zarah at first sight because I recognized her as my child, and understood the feeling that gave me because I felt the same way the first time I saw Lori. But that’s all there is to it. I can’t hide my feelings to save your feelings. If I were your patient instead of your husband you’d call that healthy and wise.”
“You’re not my patient.”
“No, but you’re the one who taught me to accept my feelings. That’s what I’m doing, and I’m grateful for the gift.”
Stephanie inhaled and expelled half a dozen deep breaths; she believed in this exercise as a way to draw extra oxygen into the system and relieve emotional stress.
“All right,” she said. “Have it your way. I’ll say no more.” Her voice was still husky. She had drawn a fresh tumbler of pure water from the plastic jug in the refrigerator, and she drank from the glass.
“You can say anything you like as long as I have the right of reply,” Christopher said. “Now. Will you come to Africa with us?”
