Tom dove into the water with his usual expertise and quickly caught up with the other swimmer. Slowing, he paced himself to keep up with the other and together, a few feet apart, they made their way up and down the length of the pool. Occasionally the young man glanced Tom’s way and smiled shyly. Tom grinned back and at one point shouted, “Kick your feet. Don’t drag them.” Playing instructor had given him his opening, and he decided to stick with the same guise. At once the young man began to kick his feet wildly as he swam. You can’t say he doesn’t try, Tom thought, liking the man for his courage if not his style.

  Five minutes later the young man was hoisting himself out of the pool and Tom, still at his side, did the same. “I was just warming up,” Tom offered.

  “I’m not a pro,” the other answered.

  “Neither am I…it’s just a matter of practice.” And then the hack line he hated to speak but had to. “Do you come here often?”

  “As often as I can. Well…thanks for the lesson.” And he began to walk away.

  “I’m usually here on Tuesday and Friday after work, and the lessons are free.” Christ, he was making a pitch and felt himself blush at the thought.

  Again he got the shy smile and the frightened fawn look. “I’ll try to make it.” And again he turned to leave.

  “My name is Tom,” he quickly blurted to the retreating figure. The fawn stopped and turned his head. Tom held his breath and could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

  “I’m Nicky.” Then he was gone.

  Nicky! Holy shit. “Well, what did you expect him to say? I’m a ghost.”

  § § § §

  He had talked with the apparition and was still not convinced that it was not Eric Hall. In fact his brief encounter with Nicky had not solved but rather had compounded the problem. And something else was now bothering Tom. Now, when he thought about Nicky he felt slightly euphoric without associating Nicky with Eric Hall.

  “No.” Tom shook his head. “No way. Complications I don’t need.”

  He knew what he had to do next but didn’t know exactly how to go about it. He had to talk to Dicky Culver. Not to tell him about Nicky, but to find out anything he could about Eric’s death without arousing Amy Culver’s naturally suspicious nature. That wasn’t going to be easy, nor was setting up a date with Dicky who had always resented anyone who dared intrude upon his relationship with Eric Hall and Tom was the only person, however feebly, to dare do so. When they met now it was when both were invited to the home of a mutual friend. But Tom did have one slight in and he was ready to use it. Amy was an avid bridge player and Tom, as Amy openly admitted the first time she played against him, was the only player she knew who could challenge her skill.

  He called, suggested a game and, as he hoped, was rewarded by an enthusiastic Amy who set a date for the following Saturday evening. Tom could imagine Dicky frowning when he got the news and the image brightened his day. He went to the Y on Friday but Nicky wasn’t there. He was disappointed, went through his swimming routine with little enthusiasm and never even noticed if the regulars eyed him or not.

  § § § §

  “Tom must find the view more interesting than our company.”

  Tom quickly turned from the window and faced the three people now staring at him. “I’m sorry, I was…I was thinking about Eric.”

  The living have a great respect for the dead and Tom’s response to Dicky served a dual purpose. It made Dicky feel a little foolish and it opened a conversation Tom had been trying to broach all evening.

  They were sitting in the Culvers’ den which overlooked Central Park, having a nightcap, and what Tom had been doing while not paying attention to the company in the room was trying to pinpoint his limestone across the vast expanse of the park. Now, he turned his full attention to his host.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Nancy Maron said.

  She was the social worker from Vassar whom Tom had all but snubbed at the Carrs’ last week, and he couldn’t believe his bad luck when she turned up as Amy’s fourth for bridge. He had silently wondered why Amy had dug her up but five minutes into the game and he knew. Nancy Maron was as good a player as Tom, perhaps better, and Amy, in her inimitable style, had ferreted out the best for her beloved game. Together, Tom and Nancy had taken the Culvers for seventy-five dollars at a tenth of a cent a point. Amy was in a foul mood.

  “Rich, wasn’t he?” Nancy added to fill the silence which followed her pronouncement.

  “I miss Eric,” Dicky said, staring into the glass in his hand. He had changed little since his school days and one could imagine Dicky Culver being laid to rest looking very much as he had looked the day he turned sixteen. Small, wiry, his horn-rimmed glasses as much a part of him as the thinning hair which had been threatening to leave his head since his prep school days. His intense and slightly effeminate manner had misled more than one opponent on the squash court where he was a formidable player. “He aims for the balls and never misses,” someone had said of Dicky Culver at college, to which Tom had unkindly added, “The faggot is one tough cookie.”

  “Why were you thinking about Eric?” Amy asked in her usual matter-of-fact fashion. She could respect the dead for just so long before her curiosity about the motives of the living took precedence.

  “Being with you and Dicky, I guess,” Tom shrugged as he spoke, giving the impression that the matter was of little importance.

  “And that picture of Eric,” he added, pointing to a torso shot of Eric Hall which stood framed and sitting on the Culvers’ grand piano.

  “It didn’t seem to distract you during our game,” Amy responded with a smile that was at odds with her tone.

  Amy Culver looked more like Dicky’s sister than like his wife. Indeed, their parents, rich and social New Yorkers, were great friends who had raised their respective son and daughter like siblings ; the subsequent marriage was more a foregone conclusion than a romantic event. She was as openly demonstrable as Dicky was seemingly retiring. Amy had worn glasses since childhood, hated them, and donned contact lenses as soon as she was old enough to make the choice. When glasses came into fashion she bought a pair of the biggest, boldest horn-rims she could find and, like one who has triumphed by persistence, was never seen without them. At Barnard she had been a good student not because she was naturally bright but because, like everything else Amy did, she applied herself to the task at hand. She approached life like a hunter, relentlessly pursuing her prey until it was cornered, killed and devoured.

  And Amy hated Tom Bradshaw. “He’s not one of Us,” she announced soon after meeting Tom but not before she had heard about him from Dicky. Amy’s statement translated to the fact that Dicky was jealous of Tom’s brief friendship with Eric Hall, and Dicky had never been jealous of anyone’s friendship with Amy. If Eric’s death was not a tragic event in Amy Culver’s life she never let anyone know it…especially her husband.

  “He was drowned, wasn’t he?” Nancy, feeling ignored, got back into the conversation.

  Dicky nodded. “In a boating accident along with his parents. You know, it’s been almost two years and I still can’t believe it. Sometimes I find myself looking for him at parties or thinking he’ll walk into a room, singing, the way he used to.”

  And I could make it happen, Tom thought, feeling like a genius surrounded by a group of incompetents. “Do you visit the family?”

  “Family?” Amy raised an eyebrow. “There is no family except for old Mrs. Lindenhurst.”

  “I’ve been there a few times,” Dicky said, used to his wife answering for him but always managing to get in the last word. “But it’s pathetic. She sees no one, goes no place and lives in the past. Sometimes she refers to her daughter and Eric in the present tense.”

  “And what a vibrant woman she was,” Amy lamented. “Closest thing we’ve ever had to royalty.” She sat upright in her chair as she spoke, as if contending for Mrs. Lindenhurst’s vacated position.

  “And all that money,” Nancy sighed. For someone interested in third world nations she was certainly keen on first world capitalists.

  “Was that picture taken at school?” Tom asked, pointing to the piano. If the photograph looking back at him wasn’t of Nicky he would eat the frame.

  “No,” Dicky answered before Amy had a chance to. “It was taken just before the accident. I had it blown up from a small one Eric gave me.” He walked to the bookcase which lined one wall of the room and pulled out a photograph album. “Some of you in here,” he said handing it to Tom, “and all the old crowd from school.”

  Tom opened the album and began to flip through the pages.

  “Dicky was a very close friend of Eric’s,” Amy was explaining to Nancy Maron. “In fact both my family and Dicky’s were very friendly with the Lindenhursts.”

  While Amy was impressing Nancy and Dicky went to mix a fresh drink Tom spotted the small replica of the photo on the piano and gently inched it out of its plastic cover and then quickly slipped it into his pocket.

  “Another drink, Tom?” Dicky asked.

  “No…no thank you. I think I’ll be on my way.” He carefully replaced the album from where Dicky had removed it. He turned to Amy. “When are you going to try to get your seventy-five bucks back?”

  “You’ll hear from me,” Amy shot back and Tom was sure he would. “Can I give you a lift, Nancy? I owe you a taxi ride from last week.” It was the first reference all evening to their previous meeting.

  Nancy giggled. “You’ll have to keep owing. I live next door.”

  Naturally; where else would a social worker live but in a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building? Tom’s spirits descended with the elevator and as he stepped onto Fifth Avenue he felt the first chill of autumn in the night air. “I learned nothing,” he thought as he started walking down the avenue. Then he stopped abruptly and said, almost aloud, “Wrong…I learned there’s nothing about Eric’s death I don’t know…and that old Mrs. Lindenhurst is senile.”

  That last thought stayed with him all through the long walk around the southern perimeter of Central Park.

  Saint Petersburg, Russia — 1889-1894

  Marie Fedorovna spoke to her husband and, as she had feared, the czar would not even consider his son’s request. “And,” the empress told Prince Nicholas, “I have even more disquieting news for you, my boy.”

  The czarevich looked sadly at his mother. What could be more disquieting than what she had already told him?

  “The English ambassador,” she continued, not looking at her son, “told Papa that the Prince of Wales’s oldest son, Albert, has asked for the hand of the Princess Alix.”

  “But he is her first cousin,” Nicholas shouted.

  “It is not unheard of,” his mother answered.

  The mild-mannered czarevich, when his passions were aroused, could and often did act on his own behalf. Now he went directly to his father. “If she refuses Albert,” Nicholas asked the czar, “may I ask for her hand? If she refuses me I will not speak of the matter again and will consent to whomever you choose for me.” It took the czar a brief moment to consider his son’s offer.

  What girl in her right mind would refuse an offer to marry a future king of England and sit on the throne of the mightiest empire in the world? “I accept your proposition,” the czar told his son.

  Alix’s reply to Albert was brief and to the point. “I do not love you and therefore cannot marry you.”‘

  The czar immediately sent Prince Nicholas on a world tour which did not include a visit to the duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1894, ten years after Nicholas had first smiled upon his princess in the chapel of the Winter Palace, Alix’s brother, the grand duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was married in Coburg and Nicholas Romanov represented Russia at the royal wedding. But Nicholas did not journey to Coburg solely as a wedding guest. He went as a lover, determined to return to Russia with a bride.

  The only drawback to Alix’s joy was the fact that as Nicholas Romanov’s wife and future Empress of Russia she would have to convert to the Orthodox church and leave the more simple and secure Lutheran faith. Since her first visit to Russia she had been fascinated and awed by Orthodoxy but, at the same time, afraid of the mysterious and almost pagan rituals of the Eastern church. But her love for Nicholas was such that she felt conversion to Orthodoxy was a small price to pay for the joy of marrying her prince.

  Prince Nicholas and Sonny ( the family pet name for Princess Alix) spent some time in England, first at the home of Sonny’s sister, Victoria of Battenberg, and then with the queen at Windsor Palace.

  The newly engaged couple were much in the company of their cousin Charles, heir to the throne since his brother Albert’s death, and his wife May. Besides being very close friends Nicholas and Charles bore a remarkable resemblance to each other and thanks to Nicholas’s perfect command of the English language the czarevich, on more than one occasion, was mistaken for the heir to the throne of England.

  During this visit Nicholas and Sonny participated in their first family ceremony together. They were godparents to Prince Edward, the first child born to Charles and May.

  The idyll in England ended abruptly and on a depressing note when Nicholas received word that his father, the czar, had been taken ill and had moved to the warm Crimea to recuperate. By the time Sonny arrived to join Nicholas, the czar was on his deathbed.

  “I am afraid,” Nicholas confided to his future wife.

  “Your father is dying and you are his heir. You must take charge of all that is going on here. You must tell your father’s doctors and ministers and aides to report directly to you, not to your mother. You must make them all understand that until your father is well or…you must make them understand that all decisions, from now on, will be made by you and you alone.”

  And so for the first time, but certainly not the last, the German princess tried to wean Nicholas Romanov from the protective arms of his mother.

  In November of 1894 Alexander III died and Nicholas Romanov became Czar Nicholas II of Russia. The dead czar’s body was borne back to St. Petersburg and the new czar’s incipient wife entered the city for the first time as its future empress behind a funeral cortege.

  It was indeed a harbinger of things to come.

  A week after Alexander III was laid to rest Nicholas and Alix were married in the simplest ceremony possible for one of his rank and Princess Alix of Hesse became the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna of Russia. The newlyweds moved in with his mother and like all such arrangements, in and out of fairy tales, friction soon arose between mother and daughter-in-law. Nicholas was a mama’s boy and Mama was a recently bereaved widow so what could be more natural for such a young man than to spend more time with his mother than with his bride? But it was not the time Nicholas spent with his mother that irked Sonny; it was the fact that the dowager empress, through her son, was ruling Russia.

  And so a tug of war, which could last for years, began between the empress and the dowager empress of Russia with the czar as pawn. The younger of the two would eventually win but by then it would be too late for Nicholas’s wife to save either her husband or his throne.

  But nothing could overshadow the joy the young couple felt at finally being man and wife. In their private apartment in the palace Nicholas discarded all the cares and pomp and ceremony that were part of the life of a czar and he and Sonny, dismissing all the servants, played at being simply a man and woman very much in love.

  “I am Mr. Nobody and I have just returned from work.”

  “So, I must prepare your dinner.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Because my husband, Mrs. Nobody does not know how.”

  Then they would fall into each other’s arms, laughing with joy at their own foolishness and make love in whatever room of the apartment they happened to be.

  “You must not touch me there,” Sonny would tease, “I am an empress.”

  “Then tonight Mr. Nobody will ravish an empress and teach her delights unknown in even the greatest of palaces.”

  Nicholas was fully experienced in the ways of sex and his wife, naturally, was not but the young czar was amazed at her eagerness to learn and please and at the almost wanton passion he could so easily arouse in her. “You English never cease to amaze,” he whispered in her ear at the most intimate of moments.

  “But I am German,” she never tired of correcting him.

  “And now I will fill you with the seed of Russia.”

  4

  Tom heaved himself out of the pool and sat next to Nicky. “You’re fantastic,” Nicky exclaimed. “Almost twenty-five minutes, nonstop.”

  “I told you it was just a matter of practice,” Tom panted. “Besides, I was showing off.”

  “For me?”

  “Why not?”

  Nicky’s eyes were on another swimmer as he answered. “I didn’t think you would show up tonight.”

  “Why?”

  He still refused to look directly at Tom. “Because I didn’t, that’s why.”

  “You don’t look like the type who’s used to being stood up.”

  Nicky grinned. “I’ve never been stood up because I’ve never had a date.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth.” Now he looked at Tom like a hurt child. “You’re the first person to ever ask me to meet them at a certain time and in a certain place.”

  Tom waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming. “Your diving is improving,” he finally said.

  “Now who’s bullshitting?”

  Tom laughed because the vulgarism did not fit the image of the man who spoke it. It was obvious that Nicky had never used the word publicly before, and he was sure Nicky did so now only in imitation of Tom. This was their second meeting and Tom was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. The flesh and blood was stranger than the apparition.

  “Are you just learning to swim?”

  Nicky shook his head. “No…I learned when I was a child, in England, but I didn’t keep at it so it’s like starting all over.”

  England…well, that was something. “Are you English?”

 

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