She didn’t understand what I was talking about at first. When I reminded her that she had written a check to one of Calvin Bayard’s charities, she again stiffened, but said, “How strange that I can’t remember. At the time it seemed of consuming importance-my action, Mother’s intrusiveness. And yet, the memory has vanished like some long-since plucked fruit.”
“It wasn’t the Committee for Social Thought and Justice? Renee Bayard said that was one that your cousin Olin was particularly determined to prove a Communist front.”
She shook her head again. “Young woman, you must be now the age I was then. Everything seems fresh and clear in your mind’s eye, but if you
live to my great age, you will find that the past becomes such a broad landscape that many memories, even precious ones, get hidden under leaves and hillocks. You will have to excuse me now. Conversation fatigues me as it didn’t formerly.”
I got up to leave; Lisa smiled in triumph.
“You’re very kind to have taken the time. How did Mr. Bayard come to be involved with Mr. Llewellyn to the extent of providing the money he needed to start his own publishing firm?” I asked.
“I was never involved in the business life of New Solway’s businessmen. When I was a young woman, we were supposed to be decorative, not to have heads for great affairs.”
I shook off Lisa’s arm as she tried to steer me to the door. “Did Mr. Llewellyn support the same charity that you did?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know, young woman. It’s possible. But it was all a long time ago, in another country.”
Ms. Graham often dotted her speech with what sounded like quotations that I didn’t recognize. I knew this one. As I put my shoes on in the building’s foyer, I could even supply the missing second part of it: besides, the wench is dead.
I didn’t think Geraldine had forgotten anything: the name of the charity, why her mother had objected so strongly or even how Calvin Bayard came to support Llewellyn. But for whatever reason, Geraldine thought the person she’d been in those days was dead. Her mother had triumphed-her mother’s portrait hung over her head day after day to remind her.
How had she spent her days back then, while Mrs. Drummond ran Larchmont? Maybe she’d thrown herself into motherhood and amateur dramatics, or county politics. Marriage had been supposed to settle both her and MacKenzie Graham. I remembered again the articles describing her return from Europe in the early thirties, looking “interestingly thin.” She’d slept around, gotten pregnant, gone to Switzerland for an abortion? And MacKenzie? What form had his New York City peccadilloes taken?
Even with thirteen bedrooms to wander through, how had Geraldine endured all those years with her mother and a husband with whom she had nothing in common? What had she been mourning, when she said she mourned MacKenzie’s death?
CHAPTER 42
Lotty couldn’t give me as much comfort as I wanted. Over a bowl of lentil soup, I recounted the details of my last several days, trying to puzzle out the complicated relations of New Solway.
When I finished, she asked, “Where does that Egyptian boy fit in?” “He doesn’t. Except I think he could tell me how Whitby got into the pond.” I described the layout of the Larchmont attic to her and my imagined picture of Benjamin Sadawi standing on a chair, watching for Catherine.
Lotty pushed her reading glasses up into her hair. “So you do know where he is, Victoria.”
I flushed, but nodded.
“And is that why you’re concealing his whereabouts? Because you want to get information out of him? If he’s a terrorist, you should turn him over to the authorities.”
“If I knew he was a terrorist, I’d turn him over in a heartbeat.” “And you’re the best judge of whether he is?”
I got up from the couch and walked over to the window, where I could see the lake glistening when car lights hit it. “It’s the trouble with these times, Lotty. We don’t know who to trust. But an attorney general who
thinks that calico cats are a sign of the devil doesn’t inspire me with greater confidence than I have in my own judgment.”
“Your judgment on this isn’t backed up by any experience or expertise. You’ve never worked with Arab militants, so you don’t know how or what to look for to say whether he is one or not. You certainly don’t speak Arabic, so you can’t even talk to him.”
I turned to look at her. “Lotty, do you think every Arab in this country should be interned?”
“Of course not. You know I loathe stereotyping of any kind. But this morning’s paper ran a story about the mosque this youth attends. The antiJewish rhetoric there runs high.” She sighed and looked down at her hands. “It seems to run high these days in London and Paris as well. Nothing has changed since my childhood. All over Europe and the Middle East, instead of blaming terrorists for our current woes, people are blaming the Jews. Even some poet in New Jersey is chanting that tired old litany. So I’d like to make sure this particular Arab boy doesn’t want to see me dead before I applaud you for hiding him.”
I pulled savagely on the cord for her blinds. “I understand: it’s what makes everything so difficult these days. What if I cut Benjamin loose and he kills someone like you-someone beloved, who’s saving lives, not a party to his quarrel with the universe? What if I turn him over to the authorities and they send him to a prison, remote from anyone he knows, where he can be gang-raped by the adult male population? If he’s not already a terrorist, that seems guaranteed to turn him into one.”
She nodded, her face pinched with worry. “So what are you doing to resolve this dilemma?”
“I’ve left him with Father Lou. He’s sorted out a lot of gangbangers in his day, maybe he can sort this kid out, too.”
“I hope for everyone’s sake you’re right about this, Victoria. I’m worried about, oh, everything, but also your own safety. You could get badly hurt yourself, you know. Not even necessarily by this boy, but by some gunhappy policeman like the ones who shot the Bayard child. Is this Egyptian boy’s health and safety really worth the risk to your own life?” Her mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “Why am I even asking that question?
You’re like your own dogs-once you have a bone in your teeth, you won’t let it go.”
We talked of easier matters for a time, but at ten she told me she was due in the OR at six, and that I should go home. And try to be careful. She smiled at me, but her eyes were sad.
Lotty’s somber words haunted my sleep, filling it with dreams where I caused disasters in which she died and Morrell stood in the entrance to a cave, shaking his head at me before turning his back and disappearing from sight. A little after four-thirty, I picked myself out of bed. It was better to stumble gritty-eyed through the day than get another hour of such tormented sleep.
I drove over to St. Remigio’s for early Mass, taking a roundabout route through the early morning streets until I was sure that no one was on my tail. I slipped into the Lady Chapel about halfway through the lessons, read in Spanish by a stocky woman who was the school nurse. A handful of neighborhood women were there, and a sleepy boy, a student at the school, was serving.
After the service, Father Lou beckoned me into his study. Benji was doing all right, a bit nervous about being in Christian hands, but he’d loved going to the gym yesterday afternoon and had started a workout on the equipment. And still had nothing to say about what, if anything, he’d seen from his attic window the night Marcus Whitby was killed.
“Don’t know how well this is going to work. I put him in the fourth grade, he can read enough English for that, he’ll improve fast if he stays. Told the kids he was African-the truth, and keeps them from thinking he’s an enemy. But they’re teasing him for being in the kiddie class, so his pride is hurt. Explained to him and them what real strength is: not beating someone in the ring, beating your own devils at their game. Only weak people take part in mobs. Never know how much of a lecture like that gets through to them.”
