Magnificence (10 page)

“Switchboard. Mr. Sumter is away from his room,” said a second voice.

She asked if he went by Chip, but the woman didn’t know. She asked how old he was, and the woman didn’t know that either. It was an 805 area code, Santa Barbara.

•

The villas were condos that overlooked the sea, a blocky off-white complex built around a pool. It was a gray day, with a cold wind whipping down the coast, and the concrete paths that led between the buildings were mostly deserted. Here and there a palm tree with dry fronds scraped and flapped or a square bed of bright geraniums was laid flat by the wind. There were no signs on the paths so it was hard to know where the lobby might be. After a while she came up behind a woman with a walker, who was proceeding slowly enough to be caught easily. The woman pointed.

Stepping through the automatic doors into the reception area, with its turquoise carpet and framed posters of old musicals, she was surprised; it seemed low-rent for oceanside real estate. To her right was a wall that blared
OKLAHOMA!
and
CATS
, and to her left was a glass wall into a small cardio room, where elderly figures looked haggard but determined on StairMasters and treadmills. Their legs pumped doggedly beneath them and they were looking straight forward, looking right at her. She had to turn away quickly lest one of them suddenly collapse.

The woman at the desk gave her a photocopied floor plan of the kind they handed out at motels, with an apartment number circled, and then she was up a long ramp to the second floor, along a catwalk and at the room, ringing the doorbell. A nurse opened the door, a nurse in a baby-blue dress and sneakers, or maybe she was a cleaning person. Susan followed her down a white-walled hallway, their footfalls noiseless on the off-white carpet.

Chip sat on a floral couch in front of a large window. He was a dark form with the light behind him, but she could tell he was very old and thin, with white hair. He wore an argyle sweater. He must be in his nineties. Wind chimes hung behind him in multitudes: glass butterflies, aluminum pipes, hummingbirds dangling beneath bells.

But there couldn’t be wind; it was a picture window and did not open.

He struggled to rise, but she shook her head.

“Oh no, please. Mr. Sumter,” she said, and bent down to hold out her hand. His own was very soft. Behind him the fuzzy, blue-gray ocean was visible: he had been given a good room. Not all the residents could have so clear a view.

After she sat down across the wicker coffee table the cleaning woman brought them tea and poured the contents of two pink packets into his cup for him—or maybe not a cleaning woman, given the tea service. Her role remained unclear.

Susan told him who she was and asked if he had known her uncle, and when she said her great-uncle’s name a smile broke on the old guy’s face.

“Good old Bud,” he said fondly, and picked up his cup of tea.

“So how did you know him?” she asked. She was prepared to explain herself but Chip did not need an explanation. He was happy to talk and spoke slowly and carefully: they had known each other through the State Department, where Chip had been in service. But her great-uncle had not been in the department because he’d failed some kind of Foreign Service test, though Chip did not use the word
fail
. So Albert had not been a diplomat but because of his line of work, which was import-export, he had been a fixture in various expat communities during a certain era.

In Bali, said Chip, and Peru, and Japan, and Indochina under the French.

“He moved in our circles, you see,” said Chip warmly, and sipped his tea.

She remembered the phrase he had written.
Much like what you’
d expect of a modern Rajah.

“I found an old letter you wrote him,” she said, and fumbled to pull it from her purse and pass it across.

“Ah,” said Chip. He reached for his glasses, thick black-framed bifocals perched on an end table on top of a large-print book. He put them on and reached for the letter shakily.

“And I was wondering,” she said, “if you knew where he got so many trophies. I mean all the—I’m his heir, and the house is full of these—”

“The club,” said Chip. “Oh yes. Old Buddy ran the club.”

“He did?”

“He loved the hunt,” and Chip nodded. “He did. He loved the hunt. He liked the ponies, too.”

Then he was saying something about a horse race and a particular horse—the Belmont Stakes, he said, when it was won by the son of Man O’ War—did she know Man O’ War? Did she know Secretariat? The hats worn by the women, in times long past, he mused. The lack of hats in horse-racing nowadays—sometimes he went to Santa Anita, he said, or Del Mar or Hollywood Park to wager on the horse races and he was dismayed by the casual dress. In former times the ladies had worn hats.

“What club?” she asked.

“He started the club in that house, you see,” he said. “It moved, later—into the desert somewhere . . . published his own record books, even back then. The members’ books . . . trophy records, you know.”

“I haven’t seen those,” she said.

“All the big-game trophies. The trophies, owners’ names, the year they were taken . . . skin length.”

“There are so many,” she said. “There are hundreds.”

“Now, Teddy Roosevelt,” said Chip dreamily, “took down twelve thousand on his African safari. Of course some of those specimens were insects. Not all big game, you see. Big game alone, I think there were only five hundred. Had your rhinos, your elephants . . . my father knew Roosevelt. Called him T.R.”

“He knew him personally?”

The old man nodded absently.

“Buddy started the competitions. Started them and ran them, ran them for years. Who could have the most kills, you know. One of every kind of deer. Every bear. You won them all, you’d have to take maybe three hundred all by yourself . . . used to give them to the Smithsonian. Like T.R. Needed their help later to bring in the rare ones. After they passed the laws . . . back when I used to go over there, wasn’t any of that. At the beginning, the soirees were nothing much. No girls, you see. The ladies weren’t much interested in that. But later they came. Yes they did. The wives, the girlfriends. When he gave out the awards, and so forth. He would throw these . . .”

He started to cough and shook his head.

“Here you go,” said the nurse, and handed him water and pills.

“I went for the parties, mostly,” he said, after he’d swallowed the pills and taken a sip. “A bachelor back then, you see. I didn’t go so often after I married.”

“My uncle was always single. Wasn’t he?”

“Never found the right special lady.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any old pictures? Pictures of him? My family, we weren’t close. And I haven’t been able to find anything in the house.”

He got up with difficulty, leaning hard on her arm, and made his way slowly to a bookshelf. She gazed around the room: shelves with framed pictures on them, a philodendron, tourist posters of Greece and Hong Kong, an old map. Finally he pulled out a thick ochre-colored album but it seemed too heavy for him, balancing on the edge of the shelf, half out and half in, as he stood helplessly with a feeble hand on the spine. She rose quickly before he could drop it.

“Oh here, let me . . . thanks, thank you so much,” she said, and sat down with it.

“Might be one of Buddy near the beginning. Long time ago, you know. My wife marked everything.”

The photographs were elaborately annotated in a spidery, awkward hand, words standing on the gluey ridges of the paper. She sat with the scrapbook open on her knees as he puttered over to a cabinet in the corner, which had an old turntable on top, likely of seventies vintage: fake wood-grain on the sides of the platform. It took him some time to remove a record from its sleeve, so long that she considered offering to help but then reconsidered in case it might give offense. Instead she paged through the heavy leaves looking for her uncle’s name. They were all black-and-white at the beginning, then sepia-toned; there were color Polaroids throughout the 1960s.

It seemed the wife had even gone back and archived Chip’s photos from before they met, since one caption, under a black-and-white of Chip and a young blonde in evening dress, read
Chip and his girlfriend Lettie “Lulabelle” Mae, May 1953
.

Finally she hit paydirt with a caption that read
Chip with, l–
r, Arnie Sayles, Lou Redmond, Frank Davis-Mendez and Albert “Bud” Halveston. Spring Banquet, 1959
. It was a row of middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Her uncle, at the end, was thin and angular with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a wave of shining hair standing up over his forehead.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember him like that. She had been thirteen years old; she would have known him then.

Still nothing but the croquet and the player piano.

Chip’s record was opera—a mournful aria. When he sat down again he was less lucid, rambling about the ancient festivities as she paged through his album. Once there had been famous people, he said. Bud was well known for lavish cocktail parties, catered dinners, fancy-dress balls . . . he remembered women with tall feather headdresses, feathers and sparkling beads, the fund-raising events for charity, the hunting expos and sportsmen’s banquets. The Reagans were there once, and Henry Kissinger. Zsa Zsa Gabor one time when she was between husbands. Ice statues in the swimming pool.

“Charity,” said Susan, clutching at straws. “So what were his charities?”

“Oh the club, freedom to hunt, like that,” and he flapped a hand wearily. A moment ago he had been eager but suddenly he was tired. She wondered if she should call the nurse.

The opera played behind them, suddenly more subdued.

“I’m trying to figure out what he would have wanted,” she went on. “What his wishes would have been, for the house and the collection. My instructions, more or less. I don’t know who he
was
, is my problem.”

“Of course his pet project was the legacy,” said Chip, nodding.

“The legacy?”

He bent forward, coughing, and the nurse was back beside them with another glass of water.

“So what was the legacy?” asked Susan, when he had calmed down again.

“The legacy,” he said.

She saw the letter, on the coffee table in front of him, was half soaked in water. It was no good anymore, she thought, and felt a curious sadness.

The old letter was gone.

“I’m sorry, the—?”

“That actress, what was her name, she had—oh, who was it—I heard that Buddy showed it to her . . .”

“Time for your doctor visit,” interrupted the nurse. “We have a checkup downstairs.” She was pushing a wheelchair.

“May I walk with you, then?” asked Susan.

The nurse held one of his elbows as he rose, steering him to the chair. His other hand pointed waveringly at the record player, so Susan went over and lifted the needle, trying for delicacy. In the silence after the
ffft
she could hear the whine of a car alarm cycling outside but the apartment itself seemed airless and sealed.

“You were saying,” she urged gently, walking beside the nurse over the carpet. The wheelchair squeaked slightly under Chip’s weight.

“Saying?” he asked.

“What was the legacy?”

“Wasn’t allowed to go in. Not in the inner circle anymore. Bitsy was very softhearted, you see, she didn’t like the hunting and so forth . . . that was where all his fortune went . . .”

“
Where
, though?”

No use.

The apartment door closed behind them and they were on the catwalk now, the car alarm shrieking louder and nearer. She had to squeeze in beside them due to the narrow passage. He looked up at her and smiled broadly and she thought, with a lift of hope, that he would say something oracular. He pointed past her and she turned and looked: a small plane passing over the ocean, pulling a yellow aerial banner. But there was nothing on it, or if there was the words were facing out to sea.

L
ater she half wished she’d asked for the picture of her uncle or even slipped it surreptitiously out of the scrapbook—what were the chances Chip would ever have noticed it missing? Instead of a constant reference point she had a new ghost image of her great-uncle Buddy that moved along beside her: a thin man in a white dinner jacket with Brylcreem stiffening his hair.

It was better than nothing.

To resolve the guilt she tried to be frank with herself. She was a murderer when she got up, a murderer when she walked, a murderer whenever she was moving. It was only during the quiet times that she tried not to think of the new title. With momentum behind her she could embrace her status: a murderer without a prison sentence, without a trial or a defense attorney, a secret and sure-footed murderer ranging beyond the confines of the penal colony. But when she was trying to get to sleep it was more difficult to reconcile. Doubts intruded. At first, before she knew she was a murderer, they had been doubts about her innocence. Now that those doubts were answered with the certainty of her guilt she thought she should be sure of everything. She should be past equivocation and bargains, now that she had embraced the murdering. Yet tensions still arose. It wasn’t enough, in the dark, to know your own sin. It wasn’t enough to admit it. There was still the silence that followed the admission.