Quartet for the End of Time (39 page)

When a thing isn't
seen
, they explained—especially in Washington—it's just as if, sometimes, it doesn't exist at all. But it was a difficult point to make because when they were asked anything specific—like who exactly would see their photographs, and what “real” things would be their direct result—their answers couldn't be anything but vague. They themselves had no idea where their photographs would go, or what impact they might have—if any. But for a while they had faith that they would indeed have an impact, and that any impact was genuine, and being genuine was good. They still believed, in other words, that it was possible to do what they'd been asked. To press into the frame of each photograph they took a corresponding reality—as though it were the responsibility not only of themselves, but of the page, to absorb the world in perfect ratio, one to one.

T
HEY DROVEON
. T
O
J
ONESBORO
, A
RKANSAS
. W
EST
P
LAINS
, M
ISSOURI
. To Ozark, Bolivar, Dunnegan, Stockton … And everywhere they went, especially as they drew near the Kansas border, Sutton looked for Arthur. For Douglas.

How she might recognize them if she saw them, she didn't know. After so much time had passed, she had only the most abstract image of either one of them left in her mind. And even that—when she tried to hunt after it—seemed nearly always to swim from her grasp. If she didn't
think of it, there they would be: she was fairly haunted by them. But always, just as—sensing their presence—she turned toward them in an effort, at last, to finally apprehend them … they would, just as easily, be gone.

What did not leave her, what had never left her—even after all the years that had now passed in between—was the moment she had stood,
seeing but unseen
, opposite her brother and Arthur—Arthur nearly unrecognizable even then. His face scratched and bloodied—wearing, for some reason, another man's hat …

What did not leave her was the moment in which—as though impelled by some force beyond her—she raised her own hand toward that hat. And the knowledge that—though it had indeed seemed as though she'd been
impelled by some force, beyond her
—there had, in the end, been no one but she who had raised her hand; who had pointed at Arthur Sinclair and identified him, falsely, as the guilty man.

I
T WAS ON A
visit to Washington, just before her departure with Louis that spring, that Sutton had made her first—concerted—attempt to locate some record of Arthur Sinclair: a whole afternoon spent scanning through the courthouse register, searching for some evidence of his arrest back in 1932. She found none.

The clerk had shrugged when she finally worked up the nerve to inquire.

That was a busy afternoon, he said, when she mentioned the date. No question there'd be some came through and released without any record at all.

She returned the next day, this time taking out all the records from October 1932 through November 1934. She scanned through them slowly, one page at a time. It was tedious work, and after a while the names and dates began to all blur together so that she worried that even if Arthur's name
did
appear she wouldn't recognize it.

But then—suddenly (she need never have worried)—there it was. Trembling, distinct, and alone against a sea of other names, which, rather than distracting from it, served instead to set it apart. Beneath the
typeset date, February 6, 1933, exactly what she had been looking for: the name
Arthur Sinclair
, and beside it, clearly marked in red, a single word:
Released.
She had not realized the extent of the relief she would feel until she felt it. Until she saw his name there, in legible letters, and that single word, indicating that he (and, accordingly, she herself) had been set free—and, indeed, some time ago.

She gazed at that name and its accompanying date for a long time. Then, very slowly, very deliberately, she closed the book and returned the stack to the clerk.

Had she found what she needed? he asked. Coolly—as though he hardly expected a reply.

Yes, she said. Yes, thank you, I have. She turned to go then—but something stopped her. No doubt her reply had surprised the clerk. She had seen it—she was nearly certain of it: something flicker behind his otherwise impassive gaze. After all, she considered, it must be very rare that—spending his days overseeing the consultation of so many years of dusty files—he might observe—indeed, have a hand in—the retrieval of some fragment, however minute and ultimately inconsequential, against that tide.

She turned back. There was really perhaps no one with whom it would be more fitting to share the news.

For some time, she told the clerk then, she had been concerned over the fate of a certain Arthur Sinclair—of whom she had not had any news since his incarceration back in 1932. It now seemed—she continued— that though she had yet to find any record of his having
actually been admitted
, it was clearly recorded that he had in fact been
released
from county jail, in February 1933.

But now the clerk appeared distracted. He blinked, and once again— unmistakably now—something flashed behind his eyes.

I know that name, he said. Twice more he blinked. Yes, I am almost certain of it.
Arthur Sinclair.
Again: blink. It wasn't so long ago I had an inquiry after
the very same man.
Yes, I am quite sure of it. Wait, will you? Wait here a moment.

He disappeared behind the stacks.

Anxiously, Sutton awaited his return. After a while she began to feel a little ill. She looked around for a place to sit down. There wasn't any.

Finally—nearly twenty minutes must have passed—the clerk returned, his thumb pressed among the pages of a book.

Yes, he said, it's here.

Now he laid the book open flat on the counter between them and jabbed at something on the page.

Yes, unmistakably: for the second time in one afternoon, there it was.
Arthur Sinclair.

But what could it mean? Sutton looked at the name, then at the clerk, then back at the name blankly.

The
Missing Persons Bureau
, the clerk said. Arthur Sinclair has been listed in the book since—he squinted at the date: August 1932.

But— Sutton began. If the file was made
before
the recorded release, it must have simply been a matter of … she paused. Somehow—temporarily—
losing track
of him during that time; that
afterward
—

The clerk shook his head.

No, he said. It's indicated that the name has been reentered every year since, and I can quite clearly recall, myself—only last month, in fact—a young man once again making inquiries. Which is why—you see—the name, just now, so clearly rang a bell—

And the young man—Sutton interrupted. Do you recall his name? Would you have for him—perhaps—some forwarding address?

I'm afraid that's not at all my jurisdiction, the clerk said. You would have to contact the bureau, I suppose. With that, the light that had burned briefly in the clerk's eyes flickered, and went out.

Sutton telephoned the bureau, asking directly for the name and address of whatever person was responsible for reentering, year after year, Arthur Sinclair's name into the Missing Persons file.

She did not meet with any luck.

It's just, you see—she lied—I have some
pertinent information
, which I am sure would be quite useful, if—

This did not get her much further.

I'm sorry, miss—she was told. That is just simply not our policy. We
are not at liberty to deal with these matters case by case. We must, for each, follow a standardized protocol; otherwise, as you must understand, we would put our clients—who put their every trust in us—at great personal risk.

Of course, Sutton said.

Then—nearly giving up: Look, she said. I admit I have no pertinent information about this case—none at all. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is purely a matter of personal importance. But, if …

Here she paused. She did not know how she might continue.

If—what? It was useless.

If I am able— she continued. But then her voice, which had grown thin, broke onto a disconcerted silence.

It is hardly policy, said the voice on the other end of the line, after a moment or two in which neither spoke. I'll see what I can do.

Two weeks later, Sutton received the name she had anticipated: Douglas Sinclair, and an address of a corps project in Boonsboro, Maryland. On her last day in New York, she posted a letter there—urging Douglas to contact her as soon as he reasonably could. Ashamed, for some reason, to provide him with her own father's address, she included Louis's father's address instead—promising that the letter would be forwarded on.

Three weeks after that, however, it was her own letter that arrived, general delivery, to Athens, Tennessee: unread. A scrawled note on the back indicated that, the project (a thorough reconstruction of the Washington Monument, which had, in more recent years, been allowed to crumble into disrepair) completed, the corps had dispersed, Douglas along with them—leaving behind him no forwarding address.

It was a bitter disappointment. As the fall wore on, a profound loneliness descended over Sutton, at times bordering on despair. The feeling was only accentuated by the vastness that stretched between the deserted towns she and Louis passed through, as they continued to make their way; now into the most windblown and uninhabited reaches of Oklahoma and West Texas.

And by another vastness. That which stretched—increasingly— between herself and Louis. Never once had she breathed a word to him
about Douglas or Arthur, and neither had she spoken (except to offer the most basic account) of Alden or her parents. For Louis it was the same: a rare occasion that he talked—if ever he did—about the past. With them, instead, it was always the present: what, of it, they might be able to seize; or—at least for Louis, who had become thoroughly obsessed with F. W. H. Myers and his
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death—
the
distant
past. More and more, with the help of Myers, Louis had become convinced that—with the correct attention and time—he might recover all of his past lives. That they might—as simply as from a roll of film—be spun out one day in a long chain, where they had remained, all along, imprinted inside him.

To comfort herself on long drives—or in the evenings, while Louis read or slept—she wrote long letters to Alden in her head. First one way, then another, she described to him the events, as she recalled them now, immediately following his arrest.

For the first time. As best she could: her father's voice. His calm advice. How “
the truth
” had sounded to her then. In that room, and from his lips.

Most often, she would defend herself.
I did it for you!
Or feign innocence:
I hardly knew
what
I was doing
,
and still don't; how can we know?
On rarer occasions she would berate herself pitilessly for what she had done. How could she not—she would wonder—have pressed her father for some other solution? There
must—
she'd insist—have been
some other way
than such a willful abuse of justice—a
lie!

But no—she had willingly complied. She had condemned an innocent man to a wrongful fate, without so much as a moment's hesitation— and for what? She was certain that Alden himself could see (as she could see quite clearly now) that
the truth
would not have had, for Alden, the same consequences it had had for the other man.

On still rarer occasions she lashed out at the Judge—or at Alden himself. How could they have put her—
a child
—in such a vile position? How could they have let her carry that burden all these years— alone?

No matter what version of the letter she wrote, however, she always closed it in more or less the same way: Did Alden also—she pressed—
find himself troubled by the past? And so piercingly, sometimes, that it no longer seemed like the past at all? Did he ever suspect—as she did— that the past did not ever really disappear? That everything remained, instead: haunting the present, forecasting the future, and rendering every effort, on account of it, utterly futile? Every outcome as inescapable as if it had already arrived?

Finally, she did write. An abbreviated version of the letters she wrote in her head, and something of a compromise between the various directions she had previously taken. She simply confessed. Recounting, as simply as she could, her complicity in the events that had led to Alden's release—and the arrest of Arthur Sinclair.

In closing, she sketched out, in a few words, what details she had managed to glean as to Arthur's and Douglas's present circumstances from the courthouse register, and very briefly inquired if he, like she, found himself troubled by the news.

A
N ANSWER WAS A
long time in coming, and in that time Sutton regretted bitterly having written at all. It would have been better, she thought— as she had long suspected—just to let the thing go.

Why had she been so bent on preserving the old demons? On dragging them up now, after so long—and not only for herself, now, but for Alden, as well? What possible motive could she have had for doing so? Perhaps, she considered regretfully, instead of a genuine desire to bridge the distance that had grown between them, it had been a desire instead— to punish him, somehow. A way of making sure that
Alden
, too, would be unable to forget—

Well, what purpose could that serve either of them now? Let alone— she reflected—anyone else? Douglas—or Arthur.

A
LDEN
'
S REPLY CAME
—
WHEN
at last it did—as a great relief. He wrote at length, and far more intimately than she herself had dared. But instead of responding to her confession, or reflecting directly on the news she had shared, he advised her to see the whole thing in an entirely different light. One thing (he reminded her) had, at least—through all
of this—become clear. Arthur had been “released.” Why not allow herself to be?