Life Among Giants (43 page)

It seemed all but eternal, but ineluctably here came RuAngela with the empty plates from our special guests. I followed her into the dish room. Our lovely dish man was a person like Linsey: very focused, competent, capable, no social graces, bottom teeth up over his lip. We'd been given a method for packaging the silverware, best practices for the DNA lab. Not, I kept thinking, that we'd need the lab or the DNA or the best practices in the end.
Th
e china went into padded plastic pouches separately—crime-lab protocol, thanks to all of Kate's research and supplies, hopelessly naïve.

Ru-Ru pushed the stew bowl toward the dish man—that was the dancer's. I helped it along the steel counter, saw the dish man take it, everything seeming particular and bright.

“I'll finish,” I said to Ru.

Quickly I unpacked the Pazzo bowls—they shouldn't be going to any lab!—replaced them with others similar, rinsed them myself with the sprayer hose, rinsed them thoroughly, pushed them along the steel counter to the dish man, who took them in his impassive way. I put the evidence sack in the unused refrigerator back there, so what? No lab would ever see it. And left the dish man to his steaming tasks.

I noted only in subsequent minutes, vivid near-term memory, that there had been the knot ends of two mushroom sausages in the stew bowl, Sylphide's bowl, the kind of thing a kid or picky eater leaves. But, of course, we didn't use sausages in our autumn-vegetable stew.

Kate swaggered into the kitchen, gave me a long look.
“La
fucking
cuenta por favor,”
she said privately, the embarrassing joke Dad had always made at restaurants if the staff was foreign. A lightness had overtaken her.

“You didn't change anything about the presentation? Nothing at all?” I blurted.

“Change the presentation?” she said.

My shoulders eased, eased again.

I
HAD A
bellyache next day by noontime, sweated profusely, grew worried. I'd eaten no more than a quarter-teaspoon of the death angels, yet spent the night hearing their voices, a chorus of sibilant contraltos, my mother's among them:
“Something you want to tell me?”
I couldn't feel good about what I'd done, all alone in the dark.

Next morning I was fine, actually rather elated, next evening mildly nauseous again, then violently nauseous, then hearing voices and wind noises in my ears, a kind of boinging sound, sense of insects walking under my hair, and with eyes closed sharp lights under the lids. Another night's sleep and it was all over. I tried to imagine having eaten five hundred times more of the amantin poison: horrible, sudden.

Recurrences all day, all the next. Sharp lights under the eyelids. Insects in the hair. Wind in the ears. Mom's voice, repeated, repeated, not so unpleasant:
“
Th
at's how you win at tennis, David.”

And Emily's, over and over:
“We've really got no one else.”

And Sylphide's:
“Firfisle-mine.”

I
COMBED
Th
e
New York Times
for a couple of days, but as it turned out, there was no need for vigilance. Because when the news came, it was everywhere,
Th
e New York Times
first, RuAngela racing into the walk-in to find me, snapping the paper folded to the story so I might immediately see:

On that Friday, the great dancer and choreographer Sylphide had horribly died in Miraj, India, a small town on the border of Maharastra and Karnataka provinces, about two hundred miles south of Bombay. Yes, Sylphide. I gasped when I read it, fell to my knees on the walk-in floor, read the short article over and over again. Two companions had also succumbed to obvious food-borne illness, one of them her brother-in-law, the other the CEO of embattled Dolus Financial, frequent companions. An investigation was underway, but there was no real mystery—the little band of friends had carried off a huge basket of native foods from an unsanctioned Mumbai market, any number of pathogens possible, had boarded a train, almost immediately fallen ill.
Th
e trio was briefly hospitalized in the city of Pune, incompetently discharged, and died a day later on a night train heading deeply south into India.
Th
e train staff had dropped them outside a clinic in a town called Bhadravadi, southern Karnataka, but too late: death had come quickly, violently. Villagers burned the bodies respectfully per custom, the day being over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Etienne, at first, was aghast at the coincidence, then for a day or two gave me long looks.
Th
en it got worse: I wept so much I couldn't go into work, fell ill again, isolated myself, a week of severe emotion, remorse, horror, a reversion to grief and guilt I hadn't felt since the days after October 30, 1970, and could not contain, no one to confess to without turning them into accomplices.

Mr. Perdhomme no longer walked the earth. Brady Rattner, same. Let us remember that, I kept telling myself, kept repeating it through my tears: Perdhomme and Kaiser are dead.

24

I waited, and have continued to wait, but no suspicion ever fell on me in the matter of the deaths of the dancer and her travel companions. No one at all ever came to me in the matter for any reason at all. I waited for Ferkie the Mushroom Man to say something, to turn up on the likes of
60 Minutes
(four segments on Sylphide to date) but Ferkie had no interest in the lives and deaths of celebrities, continued to shuffle obliviously in the leaves of the forest floor.

I suspected Kate in the unnecessary death of Sylphide, suspected her for months, let the suspicion eat at me, keep me from her. But why? My sister hadn't been in on the destroying-angel plan.
Th
at plan had been between Sylphide and me, closely guarded. And Kate, she'd never taken the faintest interest in mushrooms, poison or otherwise, either in the field or in my kitchen, would have had no reason to draw any kind of connection between the meal she'd served and the deaths. Still, my own suspicion lingered, darkened my thoughts, already dark enough, a kind of projection of my culpability, as if it were she and not I who'd picked the poison toadstools, lovingly cooked them, packed them into sausage casings. No reason she couldn't have detected my tension around those sausages, was the logic of my whispering demon: she had always been uncannily prescient with me.

Of course our DNA project was moot. I never did my job, never delivered our samples to the lab in Bridgeport. When news of the deaths emerged, I added another layer to my deceit, pretended to call the lab and cancel the project—we knew what the results would be after all, as I kept saying. Kate didn't like that. But Jack was very much in favor of shutting the DNA door forever, and Etienne and Ru were behind me, too: What had anyone to gain?

In the months after the dancer's death my mood improved, really in inverse proportion to the growth of another suspicion: what if it weren't Kate at all? What if the dancer had asked each of her solicitous dinner companions if she might have just one from them each of those delectable-looking mushroom sausages? What if smiling with the conversation she'd eaten first one then the other right down to the nub ends, knowing full well?

Full well.

A
NOTHER TWENTY YEARS
are gone. Lots of football players have long hair now—even the quarterbacks, even the best, Tom Brady, for example, who's come into the restaurant five or more times with his wife, the supermodel Gisele: take that, Coach Powers. Etienne and RuAngela own Firfisle now, outright. I gifted them my share gradually, a plan concocted by our layered, double-blind team of accountants.
Th
e place is more successful than ever, a model in the industry, booms through recessions, booms through market lulls, plenty of health- and farm- and planet-conscious eaters now, at least in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Many of our sous-chefs and line cooks—the Firfisalinos, some food writer dubbed them—have started their own places over the years and across the country, nearly always with our blessing, and if so with our money behind them, and so a kind of movement has expanded across the land: great fresh food beautifully grown and prepared, reasonable prices, not much meat.

Th
e singing from the kitchen's the same, and RuAngela's there to greet me, greet one and all. I cook occasionally, Saturday prep nearly always, but that's more to spend time with E.T. and Ru than anything else.

Because life is very busy. I'm in charge of two great charities—the Tenke
Th
orvald Foundation and the Children of War Foundation, trying to put money in places around the world it can do the most good, small business startups and rescues, primarily, a lot of local agriculture, thousands of small grants rather than many huge, and of course the arts, defined broadly, very broadly, even a fine restaurant here and there, and many a promising dance company.
Th
rough the much smaller and newer Lizano Foundation we are able to fund inner-city and rural children's sports leagues all over the world, building a sense of teamwork and fair play, offering an alternative to more nefarious activity.

Bhadravadi, that little town in India, has a first-tier hospital now, and yes, a blood bank. I was there for the dedications, on the eve of the millennium.
Th
e hospital director, a nervous little man quite awed by my height, had a small paper packet for me, made me to understand that these were the great ballerina's effects, those that had been on her person when she succumbed on the train in blue jeans and T-shirt.
Th
e clothing, of course, had been immolated with her. Her suitcase, anything else she might have carried on the train, all that had been lost, a very public train, he wanted me to know.
Th
ere'd been no rings, no necklaces, no bracelets, he said, solemnly apologetic. I assured him our dancer never wore jewelry, and at that the kindly fellow was much relieved, clasped both my wrists. He hadn't wanted to be accused, clearly, nor have his townspeople accused. He was handing over a last responsibility, had waited too long, was heartsick over the delay. I didn't open the packet till I was on the plane home, the trip well underway.

Inside was only the great ballerina's tattered red Norwegian passport, with its wretched two-by-two Polaroid photograph, black-and-white in that era, bemused look on her face, a plain person, no hint of her greatness (though the sweetness comes through). Inside the passport was another bit of heavily textured Indian scrap paper, and inside that I found the speckled heart, polished and pale green as ever, one last secret between Sylphide and me.

I
N THE END,
I did get married, but that's a story for a different time, a Sri Lankan woman I met through the foundation, Aamani. Suffice it to say that I did at last receive Sylphide's bequest, High Side and all. My new bride and I didn't want to move in, however. It's a showplace, not a home, a museum of broken hearts and not only of Dabney's huge collection of contemporary art.
Th
e modest house my folks could manage across the way is plenty of house for us, steeped in memory, and now some measure of redemption.

Th
e High Side is foundation headquarters now—Sylphide's suite of rooms and the long corridor of guest rooms adjacent to it house the front office.
Th
e Emily Bright Experience is headquartered at the High Side, too, along with the Tenke
Th
orvald Memorial Conservatory of Dance and Music, a newer enterprise, hundreds of kids always coming and going, always dancers, dancers, dancers across the genres, instrumentalists of every possible stripe and persuasion, the ballroom in constant use. We house the largest dance library in the country, which includes at least a hundred books on Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his music, more books than that on the great ballerina, including seventeen biographies, only one of them with any mention of me, by a writer who had access to Georges Whiteside: Georges confirms his affair with Sylphide, confirms that he was in love with her from the day they met, confirms that they became lovers after Dabney's death, that she broke his heart for Marcello Mastroianni, a short-lived dalliance. And then this quotation: “
Th
e actor hardly mattered, as the whole bloody time I was after her she's in love with this young giant, a kid she couldn't take her eyes off and couldn't stop yammering on about, lovely him.”

Whoa.

Dr. Chun lives upstairs, almost a hundred years old, still mobile, still the great sports fan, no longer driving. William is the houseman, too formal and stiff for me but indispensable. Also a lot of other staff to run the place, some of whom remember Sylphide and like to offer stories.

In the grand foyer there's a secure display case with the gold bust of August Bournonville inside (it is in fact solid), also now a photograph of Desmond dusting it, found only recently by the High Side archivist in a batch of Conrad Pant's papers. I can hardly bear to look, seldom look, convinced the bust is covered in my father's filthy fingerprints.

Th
ere are other displays, too, all sorts of memorabilia, hundreds of photographs—parents waiting for kids in the dance classes often linger to look. It seems Dabney holds all his old power, as of course does Sylphide. Her diaries remained sealed and were buried in a time capsule on the grounds along with some other materials, to be opened after one hundred years and a day, as stipulated in her will.

K
ATE TOWARD THE
end was steady as a seawall, surprisingly so, since for several years she'd been off all meds in favor of what I would like to say are kooky remedies, but they seemed to be working. Or perhaps, I thought, she'd finally outgrown her demons. Anyway, you didn't have to be careful what you said anymore, and that look of panic in her eye had been replaced with something like wisdom, also a shocking great warmth. She coached the girls' tennis team at Madison High, a volunteer position, and those young women loved her abjectly. She could still hit, too, still with the wicked backhand, that nasty spin, killer serve. Jack was almost eighty, still sailing
Deep Song,
the two of them forever off into the sunset. And the two of them, I swear, were still the great lovers, always fresh out of the shower looking kissed and bruised no matter what time you got there.

RuAngela threw a party for Etienne's supposedly sixtieth birthday, and Kate, actually and verifiably sixty, came down to be my date at Restaurant Firfisle. Aamani was on the road as always, breaking new ground for the Children of War Foundation in the borderlands of Mali. So it was just we old-timers. Etienne sang, his heartfelt, reedy tenor a cappella, heartbreaking. RuAngela came out in pants, no wig, no makeup, no false eyelashes, first time in public since I'd known her.
Th
e invitation had said come as you are, and we were as we came, a full house of friends and regulars, chefs from all over.
Th
e kitchen staff turned out sixty-one different tapas (one to grow on), all sorts of magnificent tastes. Kate drank champagne like the rest of us. I didn't intercede, wasn't thinking—still the loving, blind brother.

Back to Hochmeyer Haven late, Kate and I, the two of us full of festive fellow feeling. We watched television far too long, curled up the way we used to do on opposite ends of the couch, old shows we'd forgotten (
My Favorite Martian
!) and that brought us to well past midnight, Kate showing no signs of slowing. I went to bed, drifted off to canned laughter from the television.

I woke in the deep night to her shaking me.

“I had a dream,” she said urgently.

“Katy?”

“I know where it is!”

No concession to my sleepy confusion, she pulled at the delicate chain around her neck, showed me the tiny, familiar key she'd been wearing all those years. “We've got to look,” she said.

“Kate,” I said. “Kate, forget it.”

“ ‘Kate, forget it!'
Please,
David. I can't go over there alone. I won't go over there alone.”

Soon I found myself dressing again, found myself following her down the stairs and through the kitchen and across the lawn in balmy winds, found myself climbing into Dad's old rowboat, found myself rowing Crazy May across to the High Side, dead of night, all the years falling away.
Th
ere were people still awake in the citadel, lights on anyway, a whole dance company boarding there, all the up-and-coming kids Emily worked with. But no matter, Kate and I were headed to the poolhouse. Under a particular rock she found a heavy old key to go with the tiny one, badly oxidized brass, green as grass, knew right where it was. She scraped it on the cement, rubbed it in some sand, her hair tossed violently by the wind, brushed that key in the leaves till it shone, and then she tried it on the hatch door cut into the big carriage bay, a difficult fit in the lock, a difficult turning, but turn it did, and the door was open.

We crept past the miniature carriage bays and then upstairs in faint light. Sylphide's vastly complicated and thoroughly up-to-date will and endowment had expressly required that the poolhouse remain unused but maintained. At any rate, no one had been in there but the High Side cleaning staff, and they with strictest instructions from William to keep it as it was, and it was neat, very clean, maybe a little stuffy, a pail and mop carelessly left out in the first kitchen. Right at that undersized stove the dancer and I had warmed the exquisite food that had been brought us. Right at that counter, had opened the wine. Right on that bearskin in front of that fireplace, well, a lot of stuff, those indolent days of our sojourn.
Th
e taste of jasmine came to my tongue, the taste of her sweat, her salty creases.

“You were here with Dabney,” I said.

“And you were here with her,” Kate said, a couple notches north of neutral.

“Yes,” I said: no more lies. Or, at any rate, fewer.

She led me down the hallway past the many little bedrooms to the familiar linen closet, marched straight inside, pushed the corner of the correct shelf, swung the secret door into the beautiful bedroom, which was preserved as if it were a stage set. My grief hooked me once more, bottomless mourning, a musty wave of emotion, something emerging from behind glass, something former shaking off the dust.

“He said to look under the moss,” Kate said evenly.