Mystery

late, she swung along over the cobblestones with long strides, scanning the benches. Her eyes moved past him, and she took another long effortless floating stride before her gaze snapped back to him and she stopped moving. She turned to come toward him with a wondering, slightly bemused smile, and he stood up to greet her.

“Well, look at you,” she said. “You’re a vision of something or other.”

“So are you.”

“I mean those clothes.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I just mean you.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say. “I feel kind of embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t really know why. Do you, too?”

“No,” he said.

“I bet you do, though. I bet if we danced together, I’d feel you trembling.”

He shook his head. “I’m glad your mother let you come.”

“Oh, after everything that happened she got over being so mad at you.” She took a step nearer, and hesitantly put her arms around his waist. “I saw you in the courtroom.”

“I saw you too.”

“Did you call me, once? Right after that article about the fire was in the paper?”

He nodded.

“I knew it. Well, I thought it was you. I didn’t think you could have died, especially since you carried me out.…”

“It was just a mistake,” he said.

“Were you burned at all?”

“Not really.”

She looked up at his face as if trying to read it, and took her arms from around him. “Why did you want to come here?”

“Because I’ve never been here,” he said, and hooked his own arm around her waist. They began to walk along with the crowd toward the cages. “We drove past it once, remember? I thought it would be nice to see the animals. They’ve been here all the time, sitting in these cages, and I guess I thought they deserved a visit.”

“A social call,” she said.

They drifted past the first set of cages, still adjusting to the fact of each other, weighing what they had to say. A black panther paced around and around in relentless circles, and a male lion lay like a tawny sack on the floor of its cage, peering at or through the bars with rheumy eyes while a female lion lay on a dead branch above its head, asleep with her back to the spectators. Tom and Sarah turned into the path leading toward the elephants and Monkey Island. From far off they heard the barking of sea lions.

“Everything’s so different now,” Sarah said. She took her arm from around his waist, and he put his hands in his pockets. “The Redwings are all in Switzerland. I heard Fritz is going to a school there. Can you imagine Fritzie Redwing in a Swiss school?”

“Not very well. I guess Fulton Bishop is in Switzerland too—he got out in time, and Ralph Redwing gave him some kind of job.”

“Well, they’re all in Switzerland,” Sarah said. “My father says they still have plenty of money.”

“They would.” The elephants moved slowly around their big cage, nosing the heaps of straw with their trunks. A man leaned forward over the bar and held out a peanut, and one elephant shuffled forward and extended his grey, wrinkled trunk to pick it off his palm with a quick, delicate gesture. “They’ll always have plenty of money,” Tom said. “They’ll always have enormous houses and lots of paintings and cars and people who work for them, and they’ll never think it’s enough. They just won’t have their own island anymore.”

“Are we still friends?” Sarah asked.

“Sure,” Tom said.

“I didn’t tell other people everything you told me,” she said.

“I know that.”

“I just said a few things to my father, and he didn’t know what they really meant any more than I did. Or he didn’t really believe them.”

“No, he didn’t believe them,” Tom said. “Did he get another job?”

“Yeah, he got another job. We don’t have to sell our house, or anything. Everything worked out kind of okay, didn’t it?”

“In most ways,” Tom said.

They drifted along to Monkey Island, where a tribe of anarchic miniature people with tails and body hair scrambled over a rocky hill separated from the real people by a moat. Children screamed with pleasure as the monkeys surged from one end of the island to another, squabbled over food, masturbated, hopped on each other’s backs, berated each other in squeaks and howls, hit each other with tiny balled-up monkey fists, turned and addressed their spectators with oratorical flourishes, wild gestures of pleading or outrage.

“You must be sorry about your grandfather,” Sarah said.

“I’m sorry he was the kind of person he was. I’m sorry he did so much damage.” Her and her’s Da, came his mother’s voice. “I guess I was depressed for a while when I finally had to admit …” Sarah smiled at the antics of the monkeys, and he smiled at her. “You know. When I really had to admit to myself what kind of man he was.”

“After he killed himself.”

“No, before that,” Tom said. “A day or two before that.”

Her and her’s Da. Because there were just the two of us in this house.

She turned away from the monkeys. “Well, that was terrible, what happened to your friend. Mr. von Heilitz, I mean.” She looked at him with both sympathy and a kind of impersonal curiosity, and he knew what was coming.

“Yes. That was terrible.”

“Did you know he was going to leave you everything?”

“No. I didn’t know anything about it until his lawyers called me, and I went down to see them.”

“And you live in his house now?”

“Now that I have it cleaned up.”

They were walking down a path past brown bears and polar bears penned in small separate cages. The bears lay flat on their sides in the heat, smeared with their own excrement.

“I guess you don’t really ever have to work, do you?” Sarah asked.

“Not at a job. I’m going to have plenty to do, though. I have to finish up Brooks-Lowood, and I’ll go to college, and then I’ll come back and see what I can do.”

“Those are his clothes, aren’t they?”

“I like his clothes,” Tom said.

“But are you going to dress like that at school?”

“Are you going to dress like that at Mount Holyoke?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either.”

“Tom,” she said.

“What?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No. Maybe this zoo is a little depressing.”

She turned toward the bears, frustrated with him. “There were millions, weren’t there? My father said there were millions. Isn’t that something? Isn’t it really something to know that you can do anything you want? Isn’t it exciting?”

“I didn’t want his money,” Tom said. “I wanted him—to keep on knowing him.”

“Well, why did he give everything to you?”

“I used to go over and talk to him.” Tom smiled at her. “Maybe he wanted to give me the right start in life.”

“What did your parents say?”