World's End (35 page)

He was limping. He was drunk. There was a dark punished bruise beneath his left eye, his ear was bandaged and he was wearing the same clothes he'd worn to the concert, dirty now, torn, steeped in blood. What was there to say? We were worried sick, where were you, did they hurt you, I'm so glad, we're so glad, Walter, look, look who's come home. She was up off the davenport and rushing to him, Walter at her side, leaping to the familial embrace, tears of gratitude, Odysseus home from the wars, unfurl the banners, sound the horns, lights, camera…but he was numb to their touch. In the next moment he shoved past them, shielding his face like a gangster outside the courthouse, and then he was in the bedroom, the suitcase gaping open on the bed like a set of jaws.

“What are you doing?” She was on him now, tugging at his arm. “Truman, what is it? Talk to me! Truman!” Beneath her, clinging to his father's legs, Walter kept up a steady dirge, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

Nothing could touch him. He shrugged her off as he'd shrugged off tacklers in the years of his glory, single-minded and heedless, plunging for the goal line. Books, clothes, his notes, the manuscript: the house was on fire, the woods were burning. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, his lip quivering with that sick betrayer's grin—she didn't exist, Walter was invisible—and then he was on his way out the door.

Outside, the car. The Buick. They said later it was Van Wart's car, but how would she know? It was black, long, funereal. She'd never seen it before. “Truman!” She was at the door, she was on the stoop. “Talk to me!” He wouldn't talk, wouldn't even look at her. He flung the suitcase in back and sprang into the driver's seat like a hunted man, and then the car jerked into gear and lurched back down the driveway. She stood there, stricken immobile, and in that moment, through the sad slow dance of light on the windshield, she caught her final glimpse of him. Jaw set, eyes dead, he never even turned his head.

But Truman didn't leave her without a valediction of sorts. As the car swerved to the left on Kitchawank Road, presenting her with the long gleaming plane of the passenger side, Piet suddenly appeared at the open window, sprung up like a toadstool from the sunless depths of the interior. He turned to her, slow as clockwork, and lifted his pale cupped child's hand in the least and smallest wave.

Bye-bye.

When Anna Alving swung into the driveway it was just past two in the afternoon and her hands were trembling on the wheel. She'd left the rented cottage on Lake St. Catherine at seven that morning, her husband following in the second car. They stopped for lunch somewhere outside Hudson (Magnus so preoccupied with his vanishing son-in-law he barely touched his tuna on rye, and she so wrought up she had six cups of coffee with her danish) and then set off again in tandem. The Chevrolet was a racehorse compared to Magnus' creeping Nash, and though she tried to hang back and keep him in sight, by the time they reached Claverack the rear-view mirror showed nothing but blacktop. She thought about pulling over to wait for him, but the grip of emergency tightened on her, and her foot went to the floor.
Mama,
her daughter's voice came to her as it had on the phone
the night before,
Mama, he's gone,
and she took the curves in a headlong rush that savaged her tires and nearly jerked the steering wheel from her hands. Now, as she pulled up to the silent bungalow, the bungalow that sat newly painted in a lattice of leaf-thrown shadow, looking placid, normal, staid, she loosened her grip on the wheel and cut the ignition. She sat there a moment, listening to the ticks and groans of the dying engine, gathering up her purse and composing her face. Then she started up the front steps.

She found Christina sunk into the davenport, shoulders bunched, legs clutched to her chest. Beside her, stretched out prone atop an avalanche of children's books, was Walter. He was asleep—mouth agape, eyelids half-closed—and she was reading to him. Oblivious. Her voice sunk to a weary monotone. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,” she read, “his wife could eat no lean.”

“Christina?”

Christina looked up. In the past six hours she'd been through every fairy tale and nursery rhyme in the house. Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, they all lived happily ever after. Babar, Alice, Toad of Toad Hall, life a bowl of cherries. Then there was Jack—Jack of the beanstalk, Jack of Jill, Jack the housebuilder and Jack the candlestick jumper—and Humpty Dumpty, Wee Willie Winkie and poor Cock Robin. “Have they found him yet?” her mother asked.

Slowly, reverently, as if it were part of some ritual, Christina closed the book in her lap. Her mother was standing there before her, tanned from her month on the stony shingle of Lake St. Catherine, her hair newly done and a look of permanent anguish on her face. Found him? What she wanted to know was who killed Cock Robin.

Her mother's voice came back at her: “Is he all right?'

She looked up into her mother's face, the face that had been her sun and moon, her comfort and refuge since she lay helpless in the cradle, the face that vanquished all those horrific others that infested the shadows and leered through her dreams, but all she could think of was poor Cock Robin and the birds of the air that fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the news. “They found him,” she said finally.

Her mother was unconsciously clenching and unclenching her fists, there was the rumble of a second car in the driveway, Walter
murmured something in his sleep. “They found him,” she repeated. A car door slammed. She could hear her father's footsteps on the pavement, the stoop, she could see his anxious face through the mesh of the screen.

“Yes?” her mother said.

“Yes,” she said. “He's dead.”

He wasn't dead, but far better that he were. By nightfall the Alvings had heard the rumors—had heard Hesh's version, Lola's, Lorelee Shapiro's and Rose Pollack's—and Christina, stretched the length of her childhood bed like a corpse laid out for embalming, finally admitted the truth. Truman had left her. Left her unprotected at the concert, left her to agonize through two sleepless days and nights, then packed up his things and left her for good. “I can't believe it,” her mother said. Her father rose from his chair. “I'll kill him,” he said.

There was the second concert at the end of that week, big with triumph and pared down with defeat, and then August gave way to September, with its lingering warmth and deluded butterflies, with the fullness that yields to decay. By the time the trees turned, Christina had lost twenty-two pounds. For the first time since she was fifteen she weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her mother was concerned. “Eat,” she said, “you're wasting away to nothing. Forget him. Forget him and eat. You've got to keep your strength up. Think of Walter.”

She was thinking of Walter. On the first of October, while her mother was out, she met with a lawyer from Yorktown and drew up the papers giving legal guardianship to his godparents in the event of her death. As for her mother's injunctions, they were meaningless. Eat? She might as well have urged her to fly. One ate to replenish oneself, to renew cells, to build bone and muscle and fat, to live. She didn't want to live. She wasn't hungry. Meat sickened her, the smell of cooking was an anathema, fruits were vile and vegetables hateful. Milk, cereal, bread, rice, even potato latkes—they were all poison to her. Her mother would make her pudding, doughnuts, eggs Benedict, she'd appear in her room with a tray of soda crackers and broth and sit there chiding, holding the spoon to her lips as if she were a child
still, but it did no good. Christina would force herself to take a swallow, if only to smooth the lines in that kind and solicitous face that hung over her, but the broth was like acid on her stomach and within the hour she'd be hunched over the toilet, gagging till the tears stood out in her eyes.

Dr. Braun, the family practitioner who'd assuaged her childhood fevers, dabbed at her chicken pox and stitched up her knee when she'd fallen from the precipitous step of the schoolbus, prescribed a sedative and felt it might do her some good to chat with Dr. Arkawy, a colleague who practiced psychiatric medicine. She didn't want to chat. She spat out the sedatives, clutched Walter and his bright hopeful books to her chest and saw faces, rabid hateful faces, Truman's the most hateful of all. By the first of November she was down to eightyeight pounds.

They fed her intravenously at Peterskill Community Hospital but she jerked the IV from her arm whenever they left the room. She was dreaming when they moved her to the other hospital, but she smelled the river strong in her nostrils in that little space between the ambulance and the great heavy fortress door. When they pinned her arms down and started that drip of life, she could feel the water rising around her. Gray, lapping waves, nothing severe, a ripple fanning out across the broad flat surface, rocking the boat as gently as the breeze rocked the cradle of that baby high in the treetops. She was with Truman suddenly, long ago, long before Walter, the bungalow, long before the papers and the books and the party meetings that found his hand entwined in hers. Long before. They were out on the river in his father's boat, the boat that stank of fish and that was gouged across the gunwales by the friction of a thousand ropes hauling up secrets from the bottom. He'd spread a blanket for her in the bow, there was that peculiar sick-sweet smell of exhaust, the sun was high, the wind had fallen to nothing.
What's that,
she asked,
over there? That point across the river?
He sat at the tiller, grinning.
Kidd's Point,
he said,
after the pirate. That's Dunderberg behind it, and straight ahead is what they call the Horse Race.

She felt the water swell beneath her. She looked up the river to where the mountains fell away in continents of shadow and seagulls hung in oceans of filtered light.
Above that, and around the bend,
he
told her,
it's a clear channel up to West Point. Then we hit Martyr's Reach.
He knew an island there, in the middle of the river, beautiful spot, Storm King on the one side, Breakneck on the other. He was thinking maybe they'd land and have lunch there.

Lunch. Yes, lunch.

Pity was, she just wasn't hungry.

It was the morning of Neeltje's sixteenth birthday, a morning like any other: damp, dismal, curdled with the monotony of routine. There were eggs to be gathered, ducks, geese and chickens to be fed. The fire needed stoking, the porridge thickening, she could feel her fingers go stiff with the thought of the spinning, churning and milling to come. Her father was gone, off somewhere on the patroon's business and not due back till nightfall, and though it was barely light yet, her mother already sat stiffly at the flax wheel, her right arm rising and falling mechanically, her eyes fixed on the spindle. Her sisters, girls still, warmed themselves at the fire and gazed expectantly into the pot. No one so much as glanced at her as she lifted her cloak down from the hook and slipped into her clogs.

Feeling hurt and angry—she might as well have been one of the patroon's black nigger slaves for all the notice anybody took of her—Neeltje slammed out the door, crossed the yard and stopped to poke through the grass for the morning's eggs. She didn't ask much—a smile maybe, best wishes on her birthday, a hug from her mother-but what did she get? Nothing. It was her birthday, and no one cared. And why should they? She was just a pair of hands that chopped and milked and scrubbed, a back that lifted, legs that hauled. She was sixteen today, a full-grown woman, an adult, and no one knew the difference.

Absorbed in bitter reflections, she bent for eggs, her skirts already heavy with dew. Unmilked, the cows mooed emphatically from the barn, while a troop of ragged hens pecked at her heels and cocked
their heads to rebuke her with their bright censorious eyes. A pall of mist breathed in off the river with a smell of sludgy bottoms, the dead and drowned, and she shivered, pulling the cloak tight around her throat. In the next moment she plucked an egg from the new grass along the fence, found two more beneath the canopy of the woodshed, and rose to dry her hands on her apron. It was then—as she straightened up, the basket caught in the crook of her arm, hands bunched in the folds of her apron—that she became aware of a movement off to her left, where the outline of the barn sank into mist. She turned her head instinctively, and there he was, cocked back on his leg, smiling faintly, watching her.

“Jeremias?” She made a question of it, her voice riding up in surprise, conscious all at once of her uncovered head, the utter plainness of her cloak and skirts, the mud that spattered her yellow peasant's clogs.

“Shhhhhh!” He held a finger to his lips and motioned her forward, before receding into the fog at the nether end of the barn. She glanced around her twice—the cows protesting, chickens squabbling, ducks and geese raising an unholy racket down by the pond—and turned to follow him.

Behind the barn, in the spill of briars and weeds and with the smell of cow dung wafting up around them, he took her hand and wished her a happy birthday
(gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag),
then dropped his voice and told her to forget the eggs.

“Forget the eggs? What do you mean?”

The mist steamed around him. The smile was gone. “I mean you won't be needing them. Not now.” He opened his mouth to expand on this abrupt and rather cryptic proposition, but seemed to think better of it. He looked down at the ground. “Don't you know why I've come?”

Neeltje Cats was sixteen years old that day, as short and slight as a child, but ancient with the sagacity of her entrepreneurial and poetical ancestors, the bards and shopkeepers of Amsterdam. She knew why he'd come—would have known even if he hadn't sent old Jan the Kitchawank to tell her three separate times in the past eight months. “I know,” she whispered, feeling as if, for form's sake at least, she should fall down at his feet in a swoon or something.