Escape the Night (11 page)

The sun warmed them, the wind cooled their faces. Peter pretended the boat was taking the three Careys—his father, grandfather and himself—to the South Seas. The noises of reality barely sounded in his ear; he lost track of time, hardly seeing the lengthening winged shadow as it crept toward them. There was only his father's voice, his grip as they chased the buoyant yacht—a small, flawless world in which he and his father did the same things, over and over, content with their perfection.

He had forgotten the accident.

“It's about time to head home, Peter.”

He looked up, startled. His father smiled. “Maybe one more time around.”

Peter stretched it out, sheltering his boat from the wind, until, at last, it glided through a last swatch of sunlight into the shadow of his father's hand.

They sat by the fountain, putting on their shoes and socks as Peter watched the boats on the lake.

“Can we get a rowboat sometime?”

“Who's going to row it?”

“I'll help, I promise. Can we? Please?”

Charles grinned. “In that case, I'll give it every consideration.”

They were silent for a while.

“It was dark when I fell, Daddy.”

“I know.”

“Is that what it's like to die?”

“I'll never let you die, Peter.”

“But Grandpa will.”

It was quiet. His father watched the lake. “Yes, he will. Someday.”

Peter felt suddenly cold. “You'll always be my Daddy, won't you?”

Charles grasped his shoulders, a smile at one corner of his mouth, eyes grave and level. “Always.”

Peter hugged his father's neck. “Your zipper's still down,” he said.

They laughed and went home.

They did not go alone.

Once more, from a shelter much more secret than HUAC, John Joseph Englehardt was watching them.

It began on yet another solitary, dreary morning, as he was indexing books in the library. Abruptly, he looked up and saw one of his former professors, a man for whom he had excelled; it was like seeing the ghost of his failed promise.

They stared at each other in surprise; the man spoke, and offered him a cup of coffee. Englehardt could find no way to account for the misery of his work; sitting in the cafeteria, he admitted what had happened, omitting only his obsession with the Careys.

An odd expression crossed the man's face. As teacher and student they had not been close; Englehardt read it as distant pity and contempt, distaste for hearing failure's story. So he was surprised when the professor called two lonely evenings later, suggesting dinner.

He accepted with alacrity.

They dined at the man's apartment, alone; their talk was rambling and discursive, covering Yale and his studies. Knowing that the man had never married, Englehardt's nerves trembled at his indirection.

There was something, the professor finally confessed, that he wished to broach to Englehardt; regardless of his feelings, it must be confidential. Englehardt felt himself nod, expectant …

The man did not simply teach at Yale.

Occasionally, he went on, he did more confidential work, which Yale did not know. Englehardt's retentive mind, his skills in research and analysis, might appeal to his more shadowy employer. The position was modest, but …

That night, alone in his apartment, Englehardt wept.

He might have dignity again; in some secret way and place, perhaps years distant, he could repay Charles Carey for this time of silent agony.

When Englehardt at last joined the CIA, surviving its gauntlet of interviews and tests despite the black mark of his firing, Charles Carey was still sequestered in his brain.

At once, he saw that he was working among men much more serious than those at HUAC.

He sent for the Carey file, moldering in HUAC's records.

Settling modestly in Georgetown, he neither drank nor smoked nor entertained, ate only salads and lean meats, went over the Carey file in the solitude of night. Only the notes of Phillip's analyst, too powerful in his memory to need reviewing, remained unopened.

The agency became a monastery where he could cleanse his mind without the need for wealth, making its resources his own. He learned the techniques of assassination while others slept with women, saved the money others spent, used target practice as recreation, enthralled by the rhythm of his shooting. Thinking still of Phillip Carey, he devoted weekends to the study of psychoanalysis, new god of modern man, that he might control others through their inner lives. Free of friends or social life, his sole outward vanity a fondness for bow ties, he became so nondescript as to resemble the “flea on the wallpaper” that a colleague once labeled him. Englehardt no longer cared: after HUAC, he feared only to be known. His knowledge would be the most undetectable of assets and, therefore, the most lethal.

His newfound expertise with pistols was for sport: manipulating others to his ends, he could murder with his mind.

He saw himself the flawless desk man.

His superiors saw nothing.

Lacking charm or any flair for self-promotion, his bearing as lifeless as his monotone, he drew no notice from those who might grant power. This first humiliating year of stasis, as lesser men rose past him, shriveled his soul like the memory of his exile, the work of Charles Carey. Desperately, he searched for something which in itself would announce his talents.

In unconscious parallel with this new anguish, he began once more to watch the Careys.

He did not at first discern his real purpose.

Bit by bit, on a variety of pretexts, he stepped up this surveillance: to spy on Charles Carey was a drug which eased his impotence; the sound of Phillip's fear and hatred made him feel less alone. Imagining himself as Phillip, he idly wondered how
he
might best exploit the power to publish, could he place it at the disposal of his superiors, to their amazement and delight.

Finally, irresistibly, he once more opened his file of Phillip's innermost fantasies, and read the imagined death of Charles Carey.

When suddenly these two tracks converged, he was shaken by their synergy, so frightening was the depth of his response.

He must learn the contents of John Carey's will, before the will was opened.

Before the old man died.

Suppressing his excited nervousness, the sense of destiny discovered, he began to search for ways he could arrange this.

John Carey watched Peter count Fords and Chevrolets as Charles drove them both toward Maine.

The boy was life to him. He was quick and strong for his age, even smarter than his father. Already he had Charles's cobalt-blue gaze: John Carey felt as if Peter could look right through him, understand what he wanted or was saying. He seemed without fear, his leaps and bounds constantly reflected in skinned knees or a smudged face. He made paper airplanes, testing and refolding them until they were aerodynamically perfect, picked out words from cereal boxes and highway signs, played monster at bedtime, taking six different roles with changed voices and appearances—growling hunchback, unctuous, slithering lizard—concealing each change with his blanket until his entire repertoire appeared, serially, to shock his grandfather. Another Peter, grave and questioning, inveigled trips to the bindery and stories of how the Careys had come to own it. Sometimes he helped John Carey forget his own son …

He wished it were more often. This endless business with Ruth Levy was sheer foolishness: an employee, and Jewish at that. Jewesses and actresses. His own wife had been
real
, someone you could count on …

You could never count on Charles, teetering between Peter—at least that was his excuse—and the visceral dislike of turning Van Dreelen & Carey over to his brother. Such a spectacle: his older son playing Hamlet, with Ophelia a skinny Jewish editor. It goaded him until he in turn goaded Charles. Sometimes he needed help, dammit. Charles had been there for his
mother
, tearless through the funeral, as if she still relied on him.

He tired more easily, he knew that. The letters he dictated in the afternoon would sometimes drift; in the morning he threw them out. It happened too much, like the business of making people do what they'd already done. He wrote out lists, then would find himself stalled in midphrase, perhaps for minutes, transfixed by the way slanting sunlight would hit his desk, or some memory of the past.

Ellen's face in death …

He could see it in the way they looked at him—Phillip and Charles. They
knew
, damn them. Damn them both.

Now he imagined hearing things on the telephone.

He measured his secretary's silence, used other eyes as mirrors, replaying the sense of his own words on some inner ear. He didn't think he had slipped too badly yet; it was the tiredness that numbed his legs and sapped his concentration. But then, he told himself, you're always the last to know …

“Fly my kite, Daddy.”

John Carey started.

It was Peter. “Come on, Daddy—it's windy on the beach.”

Three days, gone like the most fleeting images in the window of a train. His wife and sons, waving …

“I'm busy, Peter.” Responding, Charles looked up from a manuscript. Allie was in Boston; Phillip had walked to the store for gin. He drank too much …

“Please, Daddy.”

John Carey stood, looking at Charles. “I have time now.”

Peter glanced at his father.

“I have time,” his grandfather repeated. “You don't have to wait.”

Charles rose. “I suppose I need a break.”

“Do your work,” John Carey rasped. “There's precious little of that as it is.”

Charles froze. Peter stepped between them; John Carey felt him tug his hand. In a low voice Charles said, “Don't be a fool …”

“Before you call anyone foolish, Charles, look at the difference between what
I
gave you and what little you've done.”

His son's lips tightened. In a low, flat voice he told Peter, “Go with your grandfather.”

John Carey saw his grandson's mouth tremble. Taking Peter's hand he said, “Don't worry, Peter, we'll get that kite up fine,” and led him toward the doorway. He paused there, looking back at his son. Their eyes met above Peter's head. John Carey's mouth opened, and then Charles turned away.

John Carey left with Peter.

It was late afternoon; pale sun grazed the rocks and water through wisps of cirrus cloud. He hadn't remembered that Maine was so cold. But of course it was August already, and soon it would be fall, and the leaves would tumble, burnt-orange and brilliant, crunching beneath his feet.

“Where's the kite, Peter?”

With swollen fingers, he unknotted Peter's red kite from the porch rail and then stepped down along the beach, suddenly tired.

“We can just talk, Grandpa …”

The wind in his face and lungs was harsher than he'd thought. Defiantly, he said, “We'll fly this kite higher than your father ever did,” and broke into a run.

“Grandpa!”

He turned, saw Peter scrambling after him, arms pumping and hair blowing in the wind. “Come on,” he shouted. “Catch up with me, Peter.” His chest and legs felt numb. Over his shoulder, the kite caught a gust of wind, taut string running through his fingertips as it swept straight up in a sudden draft and sailed into the air …

“Stop, Grandpa …”

John Carey ran harder, feeling a fierce, surging joy, hearing the small boy's footsteps behind him, straining to catch up. He would let him, he knew—this time he would stop, and look into his face. He turned, grinning, to call back …

“
Charles!
”

Peter saw his grandfather straighten spastically, head snapping. For a long moment he stood bolt upright, grin frozen on his face, eyes wide with terrible surprise. Then he collapsed like a heap of rags.

Peter stopped in his tracks. John Carey shuddered once, and was still. His fingers loosened. The ball of string escaped his outflung hand and skittered along the beach, unraveling as the red kite swept crazily upwards, became small and alone, disappeared …

The rest was nightmare fragments. Running to get his father. The ambulance coming in a wail of sirens. Two men getting out, placing his grandfather on a stretcher, one arm falling over the side as they put him in the back of the ambulance. Uncle Phillip started to climb in behind it. His father grabbed his wrist, saying in a tight voice, “Stay with Peter. This is mine to do.” Then he got into the ambulance next to John Carey. Two doors slammed behind them. They disappeared with the ambulance …

Phillip stared after them, hands in his pockets, shivering in the wind. Then he walked toward Peter.

It felt strange; Peter had never been left alone with Phillip. They sat together on the porch as dusk began falling. Peter cried. Phillip could not speak. He looked at Peter as if he were some frightening stranger.

It was dark when Charles returned. He was pale. “He's completely paralyzed,” he said to Phillip. Then he walked into the library alone, and shut the door.

That fall, Peter Carey entered Collegiate School.

His world expanded. Each day John Carey's chauffeur drove him across Central Park, passing Bethesda Fountain on the way to the Gothic church where school was. He wore a blue blazer and tie, had classmates and teachers and games to play. He made a best friend, sometimes went home with him. Learning to count and read, he traced the box scores in the
Times
with his finger, tracking Mickey Mantle's hits. On the weekend, Charles took him to Bethesda Fountain or the zoo. Caught in this quicker rhythm, sometimes he forgot that his grandfather was a still, ruined shell, gutted by Peter and a kite.

He begged until Charles took him to see John Peter Carey, once. They went to his apartment. Charles grasped his hand. John Carey sat in darkness, a male nurse hovering behind him. His neck looked shriveled in his white, starched collar. He could not speak or move or smile.