The Almanac Branch (34 page)

“Where are you?” he asked.

It wasn't the right question. He was buying more time to think.

“Berg. I think you, and maybe Faw, too, are in deeper trouble than you understand. Someone knows.”

“Knows what?”

This infuriated me; here he was, so transparent that even I, his sister, had been able to observe his activities at close quarters without being detected, so vulnerable that his extravagant fantasy had been found out even before he had begun to indulge it, and yet so blind to his own plain pretenses that he could even now feel comfortable prattling along to the one person who might stand beside him. Given that, though I didn't know—in some ways may not ever know—how freely he had entangled me in his illegal whimsy, I understood there was more at risk than Berg's or my feelings, I didn't bother to chastise him, or preach. I said, simply, “We've got to get all that stuff away from the house, destroy the film.”

“I won't do it.”

“You don't do it, and I'm going to have to go to Faw.”

There was a kind of shredded laughter, choked, that I heard, before he said something to the effect that he wasn't impressed. “Going to tattle,” was in his outburst, and then he said, “Where are you?” and it felt remarkably threatening. I have always had this problem of measuring my own perceptions, trusting the clarity of my hearing and seeing. Impressionable I know I've been in the past, and box-drama tutored; but he was cornered, and sounded it.

“Berg, I'm willing to help you. Let's get the equipment out of the house. Then we'll decide about the film.”

“You don't understand, Grace.”

“I do.”

“You're willing to help, you say, well if you're willing to help just steer clear, all right, just leave me alone.”

If there were an empty space between any two beings, what reason would there be for proceeding from the one to the other?
Bonnet hadn't written these words to mean what I then garnered from them. The night yard that stretched beyond the carriage house seemed now to extend in such a way that it became swollen with anger. Maybe I cared more than I thought, at least about that empty space that loomed between me and my brother. Or else, maybe there was a reason for choosing not to proceed toward him. Berg might assume that I wouldn't go to our father, but did he know that I might, in fact, be willing to take him up on his instructions to stay away? A peculiar wave of liberating peace came over me—if only that anger could be reconstrued into some sort of indifference, then maybe I'd find a way to be able to love Berg, as a sister, from a sister's distance.

I must have been crying, because he was telling me not to cry. I didn't understand anything about his project, he was saying, and there were no serious problems with anything he was up to with it. He hadn't meant to be so short with me. Nothing he was doing was intended to cause trouble for anyone, least of all the family. He didn't know what I was talking about when I said that someone knew, someone had something on him—everyone's got something on everyone. It's nothing out of the ordinary. His intentions were good, he said it twice.

I let him finish his monologue without interrupting because what I was searching for was the key to my indifference, which would be the key to my being able actually to hear my brother, even maybe help him, if there was anything that could be done to help him. The insight that came to me, as fallacious as it might have been, helped me to discover, possibly, the beginnings of what it was I thought I wanted from myself in order to survive (I recognize this is abstract, but it is the closest I can come to formulating in words what happened to me, then). You see, it dawned on me there was someone else who might have had a motive in sending me that anonymous letter. Berg himself. Why not? Wouldn't that have given him the perfect means bywhich he could escape falling alone? I considered asking him, but now I understood that anything he might say would have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Everything is graduated, shaded
, it is true.

When I finally agreed to consider Berg's request that I stay out of his way, and that I keep what I know to myself, I sat on Djuna's pliant bed and noticed how heavy the receiver had gotten in my hand. It seemed I could hardly hold it up. I was trying to remember something that I knew, not something that was pertinent to what Berg and I had been discussing, no; it was a sensation that now spread over me. That Berg had set the phone down, maybe on the counter in the kitchen, maybe on the desk in the library, became faintly clear to me through this apprehension of weight in the dark around me. I hadn't hung up, I knew, because there was no dial tone coming from the handset. My throat was a little sore, and my ears hurt, especially my left ear. When I put down the handset on the bed, quietly, because I just couldn't hold it up anymore, it occurred to me to go to the window and open it, and get some fresh night air. I stood, and made my way to the nearest casement, unlocked it, feeling drugged or dryly drunk, and pulled up, and got down on my knees and rested my head on my forearms on the sill. I breathed in slowly and deep. I remembered Dr. Trudeau once telling me about breathing into a bag, and to stay calm, not to be afraid, not to begin hyperventilating—and though I didn't have the strength to go about searching in the dark through Mrs. Cobbetts's closets and drawers to find a bag, I did tuck my face into the top of my blouse and drew in air that was caught between skin and fabric. The ocean, I thought; my damp skin smelled a bit like the ocean, salty and of apricot.

Several of the lights in the farmhouse had been turned on by the time I recovered my senses. From where I sat against the wall I could hear the tone signal from the telephone, a three-tone scale that strode up, quiveringly, high-pitched. Whether minutes or hours had passed I couldn'ttell, but I would guess that it was the former. My petit seizure—this is what must have occurred—had passed, and now my senses were clearer than spring water. I was still moving in a sort of slow motion as I hung up the telephone, and it was an almost (almost) pleasant feeling to swim back to the window. The air was very brisk. Though my clothing was damp from sweat, my skin and mouth were as dry as if they'd been baked.

When I put my fingers to the frame and began to pull down on the window, the light, or lights, up the rise, up in the cherry tree by the house, flickered in the most cheerful way. Pygmyish, bantam lights; and for a second I thought,
megrim
, which would explain my having passed out. But they seemed, and I hope you will understand,
less real
to me than any of my megrim lights, less internal to me, less a part of me: they were out there; and their being out there brought them into an even more frighteningly sharp focus.

What was Berg doing up in the tree? was my first thought, or hope. The light—now it seemed to be just one light, but jostled, perhaps in the hand of whoever was climbing the tree—was white, another indication that it wasn't the flare man out there, who finally had found his way out to Shelter Island, to his old friend, Grace. But then I realized that, of course, no, it wouldn't make sense for Berg to be up there. It had to be the author of that cryptic little message I received the other day, or someone else who was aware of Berg's film or the Trust scam—aware, that is, of the “mistake.”

Now, I have never been a brave person. As one gets older the wisdom that one gains, whether by purpose or chance, allows less and less for one to flirt with the impudence of things unknown. “Even paranoiacs have enemies,” a poet once said, and he was surely right. Nevertheless, what could I do? There were only a couple of possibilities here. National Council of Churches, I thought—I would have laughed but for the fact that I preferred to maintain myown cover. Or else it was Neden, or Pannett, or more likely one of those types—skin trade brethren of Neden and Pannett—that Berg had obviously gotten himself entangled with and possibly betrayed.

I decided that I couldn't stay here in Djuna Cobbetts's room any longer. I wanted to do something, anything. It hardly mattered whether I would walk up the hill and confront the light in the tree, confront Berg, bring matters toward some manner of denouement, or else backtrack along Coecles Inlet toward the causeways on foot, leaving the bike behind, and just get out of Berg's life like he asked me to. Up here, hiding as I'd always done in high places, aeries, looking out onto the world like a raptor but without so much as the most menial set of claws with which to address it and bring it under my control, I had no chance of bringing our scattered lives back into some kind of alignment. I felt like a child. I felt like screaming.

Of course I didn't retreat along the lapping inlet toward that miserable, airless hotel room on the other side of the island. Retreat just didn't seem an option. My life, such as it happened to be, was here. What I knew about the world, such as it happened to have come to me, had come from here, too. So I climbed, like a possessed woman out of a late-night movie, say, a zombie, someone beyond the thaumaturgical good old pale of death that you sometimes see long about two in the morning on the box, someone who can no longer be hurt because she's been hurt so much that there is no more hurting her that will register, and the direction I was headed was up toward my home. My lost older brother was there. Someone I had loved as a brother and in my imagination, as a child, as a lover was there in spirit. My father, whether he chose it or not, and my mother as well, idem whether she liked it or not, were there. And it was where I was going to go.

The light was down out of the tree by the time I got to the row of arborvitae, and it was almost past me by the time I knew what hit me. Whoever knocked me over had runpast me, past Djuna Cobbetts's house, and, I supposed, made his escape along the scree and vegetation that lined the water edge. The figure had emerged from behind the corner of the house, where the cherry tree stood, so suddenly, and bore down upon me with such frightening speed, that I had no chance of seeing him in the dark.

“Grace?” said Berg.

He helped me up, and took the sheet of paper that was there on the ground beside me. My head throbbed, not of a megrim pain, but from having been hit—grazed, really—by the escaping figure. Berg put his arm around me, and we went inside. He was as unsteady on his feet as I was on mine, and I could smell the vodka on his breath and clothes.

Of all the unexpected events of the evening, what was typed on the sheet of paper was most unexpected of all. It was the same white paper, the same typeface, and was unsigned, just like that note I had received before. Berg read it first, and his face was drained of color when he finished and handed it to me. “If you want to avoid a certain party's reporting all the activities of that division of Geiger known as the Gulf Stream Trust, and its illegitimate bastard offspring known to the Revenue Service people as the Almanac branch, and if you want to avoid a certain party's putting into the hands of Mr. Charles Brush, who, like the rest of you, will not survive said disclosures, a complete and accurate cataloguing of all ‘creative' activities that have been financed through the unfortunate lending services that you his son and daughter have undertaken to facilitate, payment of five hundred thousand dollars …” and the note went on to describe details of how the money was to be dropped off in front of a car rental desk at La Guardia Airport—it was just frigging ludicrous!

Berg was yelling something about how all this was my fault, that the only person who could have known about everything was Cutts, and that if I'd shown a little restraint …

Incredulous at what I was hearing, I said, “You knowthat's all a bunch—look, Berg, what does this mean here about ‘his son and
daughter
,' I mean listen, what the hell have you been doing?”

“That's wrong, that business, I don't know what they're talking about. I don't remember—”

“You what? You don't remember what? You used my name in some of this stuff, didn't you?”

“I don't know.”

“What kind of junk have you got me involved in?”

“It doesn't even matter. What matters is what are we going to do?”

“We? Leave me out of it.”

“Hey, Grace. It's too late. I told you to stay out of it, didn't I? I told you to leave me alone. I told you it wasn't any of your business. Well, you didn't listen to me. You're in it, too, now. I think what we have to do is pay him. He goes through with this and everything falls to pieces.”

“Not everything, not me. I haven't done anything.”

“We don't know who this is doing this, but as I said it seems to me that Cutts is the only person I can think of—”

“Cutts would never do this. That wasn't him just then.”

“How do you know?”

“I don't know for sure, but I'm saying Cutts, this just isn't something he would do, that's all.”

Berg paused, and said, the paper quaking in his hand, with as studied a calm as he was able to summon, “Do you have any idea how Faw would react if he knew about you and Cutts?”

“I'm not six years old, Burke. There are limits, all right, there are limits to how much I'm going to be able to care what he or you or anybody else thinks. Whatever right he might have to make a negative judgment of me has got to be offset by what he's doing himself out there, with this church thing, and all the rest. I don't pretend to understand business, and I think he's wise enough not to pretend to understand my personal life. For openers, he'd realize what Cutts and I did is none of his business, so to speak.”

“And what about Bea? What about your friend Bea? How would she feel if she knew?”

“Pretty cowardly thought.”

Berg folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and in a quieter voice said, “What about me and Faw?”

“You actually want to pay this person, is that what I'm hearing here? Have you lost your mind?”