The Second Sight, page 9
Patchen loved baseball. He said that he felt at home in Fenway Park because the Red Sox fans were like Cleveland Indians fans: loyal and passionate but childlike and ignorant. He had a theory that the players on both teams habitually lost the big games out of a subconscious need to punish their fans for their stupidity. “Imagine playing day after day in front of thousands of people who scream hysterically for pop-ups, sing a song that says Dominic DiMaggio is better than his brother Joe, and think that baseball was meant to be played without the bunt, the hit-and-run, or the stolen base, just boom, boom off a tin wall,” he said. “Look at Ted Williams’s face; he’s playing in a state of hopeless disgust.” Martha chided him when he spoke in this way. “Thee must not be so hurtful in your opinions,” she would say. She studied at ballgames and cried in the movies, which were often, in those days just after the war, about sad misunderstandings between wounded veterans and the girls who loved them. She and Patchen seemed to have no misunderstandings. Christopher liked her tremendously, and while she was still in Cambridge she provided him and Patchen with an inexhaustible topic of conversation.
She graduated the following June. In September Patchen and Christopher became roommates; they had met too late the year before to move in together. Christopher’s room contained a great many framed photographs and drawings. Most of these were pictures of the same pretty, fair-haired woman. She appeared in riding clothes, in a white tennis skirt, in a bathing suit, and many times in sailing clothes aboard the same boat.
“Your mother?” Patchen asked.
“Yes.”
Oftentimes the woman held a child in her arms. It was obvious that the child was Christopher; his face resembled hers very closely. Patchen had become interested in art at Harvard, and he had encountered versions of the face Christopher shared with his mother in the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, especially the one called Knight; it was not that Christopher looked like Dürer’s romanticized subject, but that some hint of the knight’s features was present in his own still face. The effect was reinforced by a drawing in which a very young Christopher and his mother were idealized as Madonna and child after the style of the Italian Renaissance artists who had inspired Dürer. In another, larger drawing executed in pre-Raphaelite terms, she faced the artist serenely, feet together, arms hanging easily by her sides, nude and in an early stage of pregnancy. She was very young, with wide intelligent eyes, exquisite breasts, and graceful legs that were somewhat longer than they ought to have been in proportion to the rest of her body. She was smiling a deeply happy smile, as if she alone knew the secret of her condition. This astonishing picture, so perfectly drawn that it was more lifelike than a photograph, and the fact that it was displayed on Christopher’s wall, made Patchen uncomfortable; he did not know what to say about it. Christopher clearly understood this; he even seemed to be amused by Patchen’s embarrassment. But, as usual, he volunteered no explanations.
Patchen learned that Christopher’s father was in Berlin, working for the military government, and that he had relatives named Hubbard who lived in New York City. That Thanksgiving Christopher invited Patchen to spend the holiday weekend in the country with his family.
“Won’t I be in the way?” Patchen asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “There’s lots of room. My father is coming over. He may have someone with him, but there won’t be many people. Two or three cousins.”
The next night they took the midnight train from Boston to Pittsfield, at the other end of Massachusetts, and after stopping at every station along the 150-mile line, arrived at dawn. Two rawboned middle-aged men met them on the platform. From the train window they seemed to be twins, with the same long Yankee faces and the same gestures and voices. Patchen stood by, leaning on his cane, while they greeted Christopher. It was a joyous reunion, with the older men hugging him and ruffling his hair as if he were a boy coming home from school. After a moment they turned to Patchen and he saw that they were not identical: one was fair like Christopher but the other had darker hair. Both were very tall.
“My father, Hubbard Christopher,” Christopher said, introducing the blond man, “and this is our cousin, Elliott Hubbard.”
The Harbor, as the family’s country house was called, lay in a valley between two steep, wooded mountains. There was nothing grand about it—it was an ordinary New England farmhouse, low and rambling, heated by wood stoves. No one else was awake when they arrived.
Elliott Hubbard led Patchen to his room over squeaking floors made of wide boards. “The Harbor was built by the first Aaron Hubbard in the early 1700s, soon after he married a widow named Fanny Christopher,” Elliott said. “The two families have been marrying each other ever since. Hubbard’s father and my mother were Christopher twins. So are Hubbard and I, for all intents and purposes, even though I’m a whole month older than he is.”
Patchen said, “Paul doesn’t resemble you.”
“No,” Elliott said. “He looks just like his mother.”
“I know. Paul has a lot of pictures of her. Will Mrs. Christopher be here, too?”
The smile vanished from Elliott’s face. “No, she won’t,” he said. “Didn’t Paul tell you? Lori was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939. We haven’t seen her since.”
Patchen was unable to speak for a moment. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
Elliott put a hand on his shoulder. “How could you know? I’m just glad you asked me instead of Hubbard. He thinks she’s still alive.”
“After all these years? What about Paul?”
“He may think so, too. Out of loyalty to his father. They were a very close family.” He opened the door to a bedroom. “Here we are. The bathroom is right across the hall. Why don’t you change into old clothes and come right down to breakfast? I’m on K.P.”
By the time Patchen changed and found his way through the house to the kitchen, the other members of the house party were seated at the table. Christopher introduced them—Elliott’s wife, Alice, and their son Horace, a lanky adolescent who looked like his father and Hubbard Christopher, and a squat, powerful man who obviously was not a member of the family.
“Barney Wolkowicz,” the man said, lifting a hairy hand in greeting but not offering to shake hands.
“Barney works with my father in Berlin,” Christopher said. “For him,” Wolkowicz said.
Breakfast, consisting of lumpy oatmeal porridge with maple sugar and cream, scorched pancakes with maple syrup, eggs and sausage, and thick slices of homemade bread toasted over an open stove lid, was cooked by Hubbard Christopher and Elliott Hubbard. While they worked they drank thirstily from large crockery mugs. It was not yet seven o’clock in the morning.
“Have some,” Elliott said, pouring a glass for Patchen. Patchen stared at the frothy liquid. “Is that beer?”
Hubbard Christopher lifted his mug. “Strong ale.”
Alice Hubbard spoke up. She had an amused face, an amused voice. “The Hubbard idea is that everything you eat on Thanksgiving should be grown on your own land,” she said. “Therefore, no coffee or tea. But if you want some you can have some. I’ll smuggle it to you in a beer mug.”
“Thank you. I’ll try the ale.”
Hubbard Christopher watched Patchen drink to make sure he liked it, then went back to frying pancakes. “All this stuff is storebought, of course,” he said. “But all of it used to be grown here, even in my lifetime. Our grandfather made his own ale. The hops vine his grandfather planted is still alive out by the woodshed. About half the brew would explode all over the pantry walls, but what was left was potent.”
Hubbard’s friend Wolkowicz showed no interest in the stories. In complete silence, he loaded huge mouthfuls of egg, sausage, and pancake onto his fork and washed them down, apparently without chewing, with long drinks of ale.
At the end of the meal, Hubbard caught his eye. “Game for a treasure hunt, Barney?”
Wolkowicz mopped up his plate with a slab of toast. “What kind of a treasure hunt?”
“A real one. For real gold.”
Hubbard produced a faded surveyor’s map, much folded and mended at the creases with Scotch tape, and spread it out on the table. It had been ruled in pencil into squares, and inside each square a year had been written by different hands.
“This is the Harbor farm,” he explained. “Each square is an acre. We search one square a year every Thanksgiving Day, trying to find a treasure that was buried somewhere on this map by our late cousin Eleazer Stickles. The treasure is buried underneath a wild apple tree that had been split by lightning, with the two parts bound together by a heavy chain, thirty-five paces straight north from a ledge on which the letter ‘T’ is carved.”
“ ‘T’ for ‘treasure’?”
“Nobody knows.”
“How do you know about the apple tree and all that?” “Eleazer wrote it all down in his journal in cipher. Our fathers, Hubbard’s and mine, cracked the code a hundred years later, when they were kids, and the treasure hunt has been on ever since.”
“But only on Thanksgiving?”
Hubbard smiled. “Rules of the game.”
He and Elliott led the party up a mountainside to a grove of enormous maple trees. To Patchen, raised in an Ohio village far from any real woods, the Berkshire forest seemed primeval: gnarled limbs etched against the bleached autumn sky; huge gray rocks, barnacled with fungus, rising out of the mat of soggy leaves.
Patchen still used a cane, and Christopher and Horace stayed by his side. Despite their slow progress they did not fall far behind the leaders, who stopped often to take compass sightings and consult the map.
Wolkowicz, apparently oblivious to nature, read a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as he sauntered along behind the group, but after the first half-hour he closed the book and plunged ahead on his own.
“Should I go after him?” Horace asked. “He doesn’t know the woods.”
Hubbard shook his head. “No need to worry about Wolkowicz,” he said.
They watched him as he disappeared among the trees. Although everyone else was dressed for the woods in jeans and flannel shirts, Wolkowicz wore a Tyrolean hat and a peculiar dark suit that seemed to have been cut from an old Wehrmacht uniform: in the strong morning sunlight, the original gray-green color was still visible beneath the black dye.
A few minutes later, as the party crossed a clearing, he appeared on the ridgeline and whistled piercingly.
“I’ve found something,” he said, when they reached him. “Where?” Hubbard asked.
“Down there, on the other side of the brook.”
Elliott consulted the treasure map. “If you crossed the brook you’re in the wrong square,” he said.
“The wrong square?” Wolkowicz said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re outside this year’s boundary on the map, Bar ney,” Hubbard said. “We have to stay inside the square we’re searching. Those are the rules.”
“The rules,” Wolkowicz said, tonelessly. “Okay, I call time out. Come on, kid.”
He threw his arm around Horace’s shoulder and led him away. The others followed them through a grove of paper birches and then down a defile beside a shallow brook. Finally they came to an immense uprooted maple. The tree had uplifted a disk of soil and moss perhaps twenty feet in diameter with it when it fell, and the big smooth prints of Wolkowicz’s city shoes showed where he had walked on the moist earth. They led to a flat rock that lay in the middle of the circle.
Tell me something, Horace,” he said. “Are you going to go to Yale like your old man and your uncles?”
“I hope so,” Horace said.
“Then have a look under that rock,” Wolkowicz said.
Horace slid the rock aside, revealing a round hole in the earth. There was some sort of cavity beneath.
“Reach inside,” Wolkowicz said.
“Here comes the ball of drowsy black snakes,” Hubbard said. Horace lay down and reached inside the cavity. After a moment he sat up.
“It’s full of bones,” he said.
“Bones?” Elliott said. “What kind of bones?”
Wolkowicz fell to the ground beside Horace and thrust his own arm into the hole. He brought out a human skull, dangling from his forefinger by an eye socket.
“Here,” he said to Patchen. “Hold this.”
He flipped it through the air; Patchen trapped it against his chest with his good arm. Wolkowicz groped in the hole again and found another, smaller skull, and then what appeared to be a femur.
“That’s enough,” Elliott said.
Wolkowicz stood up, the femur in his hand. His suit was smeared with the manurish yellow soil. “Dry as chalk,” he said. “These are old bones, maybe a hundred years old.” He opened his hand and displayed a flint arrowhead. “This was in the hole, too. They must be Indians.”
“Mahicans,” Horace said. “It’s a Mahican burial ground.” Wolkowicz took the larger skull out of Patchen’s arm and handed it and the femur to Horace.
“Here, kid,” he said. “Take these to Yale when you get there and add ’em to the collection at Skull and Bones. Maybe you’ll make Reaper, like your Uncle Waddy.”
He strode off through the woods.
Horace knelt by the burial place and replaced the skull and bones Wolkowicz had given him.
Elliott watched Wolkowicz’s stocky figure as it disappeared among the trees. “Funny fellow,” he said. “How did he know Waddy was Reaper in his year? How did he even know the word ‘Reaper’?”
“Barney knows all about skeletons,” Hubbard replied.
6
DURING THE LONG WALK DOWN THE MOUNTAIN, THE WIND GREW stronger. As they came to a place where they could see the Harbor in the valley below, Hubbard stopped and put his arm around his son’s shoulders. The wind moaning among the trees produced a throaty animal-like sound, so that the mountain itself seemed to be growling.
“Lions,” Hubbard said.
He and Christopher, grinning at each other, linked arms, faced the forest, and shouting in German at the top of their lungs, recited what seemed to be a poem.
They waited, listening intently. After a moment the wind died. The pause was brief, but there was a noticeable interruption.
“It worked,” Hubbard said. “It always works.”
“What was it you were reciting?” Patchen asked.
“Scrambled Blake,” Hubbard replied. “It means,
“Lion, lion, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“It’s nonsense in German, but it isn’t the words that count, it’s the language. German is the only language lions understand.”
Patchen knew, even though he could not remember when or where, that he had heard this phrase before.
“What is that saying from?” he asked.
“What saying?”
“ ‘German is the only language lions understand.’
“It’s not from anything,” Hubbard replied. “My wife made it up. When Paul was little, he thought the wind in the woods sounded like lions. Someone had told him there were lions in America, waiting to eat him up. One night when the wind was blowing like this, his mother brought him to this spot and told him to recite that verse in German. When he asked why, Paul was always asking why, that’s what she told him.”
TWO
1
HUBBARD CHRISTOPHER WAS KILLED THE FOLLOWING AUTUMN WHEN he was struck by a car in Berlin. In the family burial ground at the Harbor, Paul Christopher released a handful of his father’s ashes into the wind on the hillside above the Harbor. The little company of mourners—members of the family and a few men from Washington—smiled faintly as they watched the puff of gray powder disperse in the limpid September air, as though an invisible Hubbard ambled from guest to guest, whispering jokes to relieve the solemnity of the moment.
Afterward, Patchen limped down the hill alone. One of the affable mourners, a pink-skinned, white-haired man in a dark suit and a homburg hat, slowed his pace to walk beside him.
“You must be David Patchen,” he said.
“Yes.”
He wore pince-nez with thick round lenses, and these reflected the autumn foliage and magnified his blue eyes. They twinkled: he looked like the kindly family doctor in a Norman Rockwell illustration.
“I don’t know if you realize it,” he said, “but Hubbard Christopher took a great shine to you.”
“If that’s so,” Patchen said, “I’m very glad to hear it. We only met once.”
“It’s so, all right, or I wouldn’t be telling you it is. Hubbard thought the world of you. Have you ever thought about getting a monocle?”
“A monocle? No.”
“Hubbard thought it would be a good idea. He was going to mention it to you next time you met. You might consider it. Once you learn to keep it screwed in it’s a dandy thing to wear. Hypnotizes people—it’s all they can look at, so they forget the rest of the appearance. ‘What did he look like?’ you ask. ‘He had a monocle,’ they say. Can’t remember another blessed thing about the fellow. Hubbard’s wife’s uncle, old Paulus von Buecheler, had a monocle. Lost his eye in the First War, fighting the Russians. He got a monocle right away. In later years he fell off a jumping horse ‘ and kept the monocle in; fell off Hubbard’s boat in a storm in the Baltic and swam ashore without losing it. Of course, he was a real old-fashioned Prussian, but there’s no reason why a monocle wouldn’t be a good solution for you.”
