“It's a wonderful story, isn't it?”asked Craven, shaking his head in wonder. “Except, of course, there is not a word of truth in it. O'Brien never borrowed any money from his daughter or his son-in-law. He stole it, all of it—kickbacks, bribes, payoffs: the tariff charged by the police to protect all the illegal operations that let everyone who could afford it have the kind of good times they wanted. The chief must have died laughing. He lived well, died rich, and did it all on other people's money. And even though they knew what he really was—because they were all in some sense in it with him—both the people who paid him off and the judges and the politicians who were paid off with him had no choice but to sing his praises and build monuments in his name.
“No one seemed to notice, or if they did, no one seemed to care, about the way he had used his own daughter to cover his crimes. She and her cowboy star husband were left to smile and nod and grow teary-eyed at the way he had schemed to save them from themselves. They had to stand in front of all the photographers and reporters and newsreel cameras and fill in all the blanks in the story of how irresponsible they had been in the way they had spent their own money, the way they had given him whatever he had asked for and somehow never even noticed that the new car he wanted had never been purchased and the new house had never been built. They had to do the best acting job of their lives to convince everyone that they were thoughtless, irresponsible fools who on their own would never have bothered to save anything to take care of their only child. They had to look into a camera and show how deeply grateful they were that thanks to Daniel O'Brien their only child would never have the misfortune to have to rely on his own parents.”
“What happened?”I asked, urging him to go on.
“The daughter and the son-in-law? Nothing good, I'm afraid. A few years later, sometime in the late thirties, Kate O'Brien died under rather mysterious circumstances. There were rumors the police suspected her husband, but, mind you, the police never said that. They never said anything. The studio probably had something to do with that. No one wanted that kind of scandal. But Tim Cassidy never worked again. His career was nearly over anyway, and no one really noticed that he was gone. He just disappeared. I don't mean he went into hiding, or even left town. He didn't do anything, really. He stayed in the same Beverly Hills house until he died, almost twenty years later. But he might as well have left the country. He was never in another movie.”
Craven stood up and stretched.
“I don't know why it all happened. Perhaps he resented the way he had been dragged into a lie. Perhaps,”he added, his voice subdued, “he resented the fact that this corrupt old man had in a certain sense replaced him in the eyes of his only son. I've always thought there was something slightly incestuous about it, the way O'Brien used his daughter to establish himself as the dominant male in the life of his grandson.
“Well,”he said briskly, his eyes coming back into focus, “that all happened a long time ago. The only thing certain is that thanks to the crimes of his grandfather, Lawrence Goldman started out a very rich young man.”
“Do you think he knows? About his grandfather, I mean,”asked Marissa.
“There was a story, years ago, that his father told him all about it and that Lawrence then left the house and never saw his father again. All I know for sure, however, is that I have never once heard him mention his father's name.”
An enigmatic smile flickered on Marissa's mouth. “I wonder if he finds it ironic that, like his grandfather, he's about to become the male parent to his daughter's fatherless child.”
“Lawrence has never been much given to irony,”replied Craven dryly as he settled behind the wheel. “My turn to drive,”he remarked with a sideways glance at Bobby.
There was a loud gurgling sound as he pushed forward the accelerator lever and began to steer the boat away from the island shore. The desolate brick building receded into the distance and then vanished from view as Craven took us around the far end of Angel Island.
We passed along the other side and made our way beyond Sausalito and out into the current that flowed in from the sea. The yellow face of the sun stared straight through the reddish rust-colored Golden Gate. Clinging to the single masts of their boards, wind surfers, clad in black rubber suits, darted across the rolling chalk-green waves like some strange species of winged insects that had been here long before the first primitive movements of man and would be here still after the last man had died.
T
he boat moored safely at the dock, Marissa and I left the others at the marina and drove across the Golden Gate to her house in Sausalito. While she showered and changed, I sat on the back deck and gazed out across the bay, retracing our journey past the city, beneath the Bay Bridge, around Treasure Island, and behind Alcatraz to that abandoned place on the other side of Angel Island. All I could see of it now, in the dim purple light of dusk, was a saddle-shaped silhouette just across the narrow waterway. You could live here forever, look out at it every day, and never know that there was anything on the opposite shore, much less those grim, haunting ruins.
I felt Marissa's hand on my shoulder.
“Do you like my house, Joseph Antonelli?”she asked as she held out a glass of wine.
I stood up and leaned back against the wooden railing, surveying the chocolate-brown shingle-sided house. Dark green shutters were nailed permanently in place next to white-trimmed paned windows. Copper gutters with their own green patina stretched under the edge of the steep wood-shingled roof. The railing on the deck was painted white, and orange clay pots filled with red geraniums were scattered off to the side.
“It's a great house.”I turned around and, with my elbows on the railing, looked down over the steep hillside and along the narrow street that ran through the center of town and then out along the shore of the bay. Just beyond the yacht harbor below, the few sailboats still on the water raced home against the night.
“How long have you lived here?”I asked, dangling the glass from my fingers as I stared at the bay.
“Eighteen years,”replied Marissa. She was standing next to me, watching the water grow dark. “Seven years since the divorce.”
She lifted the glass to her lips and then, when she had finished, a bittersweet smile crossed her mouth.
“He got his girlfriend, and I got the house.”
It was hard to think of her as a woman anyone would have left. She was really quite beautiful. More than that, she had the kind of imagination that could make things you always thought trivial and commonplace seem somehow mysterious and unique. She was one of the most remarkable women I had met, but Marissa was not young anymore, and when it came to the difference between youth and the power to enchant, men were often fools.
“What were you thinking just now, when I first came out? Were you thinking about what is on the other side?”asked Marissa, looking across at Angel Island.
“Yes,”I replied, no longer surprised when she knew what I was thinking. I had almost come to expect it.
She had changed into a white blouse and a flowing cotton skirt. She was wearing Moroccan sandals. Her hair had the scent of jasmine.
“And about what Albert said about Lawrence Goldman?”
“Yes, about that, too.”
She bent down and snipped off a dead geranium from a terra-cotta pot, then held it in her hand, twisting the stem so that it spun first one way, then the other.
“Remember what Albert said about his grandfather?”I asked, reminding her of the way the police chief, Dan O'Brien, had once run things in the city. “I think my grandfather was one of the people who paid him off.”
I told her what Bobby had told me, about the choice our grandfather had made between prison and bribery, and how, to our pretended regret, he had chosen honor over money. She put her hand on my arm.
“So part of Lawrence Goldman's fortune comes from money stolen from your grandfather. Do you see where this could go? If your grandfather had not been so good at what he did, had not made all that money, he would not have been able to bribe his way out of prison, and Dan O'Brien would not have had as much money as he did. And if he didn't have that much money, Lawrence might not have done nearly so well; and then Jeremy Fullerton wouldn't have been that interested in getting close to him and might never have had anything to do with his daughter. So you see, it's all your fault, Joseph Antonelli. At least, it's your family's fault.”
Stepping back, Marissa gave me an appraising glance. “But that isn't what you're thinking, is it? You're thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could somehow get even—do something to Lawrence Goldman—to make up for what his grandfather did to yours.”
“Even before I knew about his grandfather, Lawrence Goldman didn't sound like someone I'd like. But I'm really not much interested in him; I'm much more interested in his daughter. She seems to be right in the center of all this, and the only thing I know about her—other than the fact she's Lawrence Goldman's daughter—is that she worked for Fullerton, was having an affair with him, and thinks she's carrying his child.”
Marissa looked at me, a puzzled expression on her face. “'Thinks she's carrying his child'? You mean, she isn't?”
I had not told anyone what Jeremy Fullerton's widow had told me about her husband, but I had come to trust Marissa implicitly. Talking to her had become as easy, and as private, as that inner dialogue we carry on with ourselves. With a few disconnected words, a change of expression, a barely perceptible alteration of tone or emphasis, we understood each other perfectly.
“Jeremy Fullerton couldn't …”
“Have children? Meredith Fullerton told you that? She must have trusted you a lot to tell you that.”
Reflected off the black water, the lights of the city seemed to reach across the bay. I remembered the way Jeremy Fullerton's widow kept looking out the window, drawn back to the place where she and her husband had still been free to imagine things the way they wanted them to be.
“She asked me if I had ever read
The Great Gatsby.
She said that when they were first married, they used to walk late at night down to the water and look across at the city and that it reminded her of the way Gatsby used to stare across the Sound at the green light on the dock where Daisy lived.”
“He had the eyes for it,”Marissa said after she had thought about it, “the eyes of someone always dreaming about something, something deep down they know they can never have, not really, not the way they want to have it.”
Marissa lifted her face and with her hand brushed back her hair. “In a way, everyone does that about something, don't they? When I was a girl, I used to think about things that would happen, things I was going to do.”
She laughed, a self-deprecating laugh, but her eyes sparkled with the memory of what she had been like, a young girl dreaming about what she would be. And she had no regrets about the life she had wanted.
“I used to think about the things that would make me noticed, the things that would make other people want to be with me.”
Taking her arm, I pulled her close and slipped my hand into hers. In the darkness I looked down at the wooden deck and moved my foot until it touched the tip of her sandal. In the breeze that whispered up from the bay, the end of her skirt wrapped around my knee.
“That's what Jeremy was doing, wasn't he? Dreaming about what he would do, about the things that could happen, so that what he loved would love him back. It's not that hard to understand. It's the oldest story there is: the young man who loves something he can't have because he isn't thought to be good enough, or rich enough, or prominent enough, or from the right family. And so he goes off and does whatever he has to do to become the kind of man he thinks he has to be. Gatsby became a thief; Jeremy became perhaps something worse; because they both thought they had no other choice. We all do that, too, don't we? Do things we never thought we would because we don't think we have any other choice.”
Marissa kissed me gently on the side of my face, then wrinkled her nose and laughed.
“You taste like salt. Why don't you take a shower, and instead of going out, let's just stay here. I can throw something together for dinner. It won't be too bad. I promise.”
She took two steps toward the sliding glass door and stopped. “And over dinner I'll tell you what I can about Lawrence Goldman's daughter.”
Because we had planned to go out, I had brought a change of clothing. Half an hour later, dressed in gray slacks and a blue oxford shirt, I sat barefoot at the dining room table, twisting my fork into a second plate of some of the best linguini I had ever tasted.
“Feel better?”asked Marissa from the other side of the gleaming black table. Sliding her plate to the side, she raised a glass of gray Riesling to her lips.
I was hungrier than I had thought, and I kept on eating, nodding my response. She watched me with a kind of amused satisfaction until I finished and put down my fork.
“Ariella Goldman,”I reminded her after I wiped my mouth with a napkin.
The candle on the table between us flickered for a moment, the small flame bent by a sudden rush of air as the nighttime breeze passed through the screen door. Marissa sat quietly, a pensive expression on her face, as if there were something she wanted to tell me but had not decided she should. I looked at her, a question in my eyes.
“I haven't told you quite everything about the reason I was divorced,”she said presently.
The base of the wineglass was balanced on the fingers of both hands. She stared at the clear crystal as if somewhere just on the other side of it were the answer to a riddle, the riddle, I suppose, of the things that happen between two people who live together for any appreciable period of time.
“I had breast cancer,”she said, her gaze fixed on the crystal glass. “I had a mastectomy. That was not the reason for the divorce—or perhaps it was. I'm not really sure. I think it actually prolonged the marriage. I think he felt an obligation to stay, to try to make it work.”