The Promise of Light (7 page)

Harley told me this. He said that the journalists were all paid not to write about what had happened. They were paid and then they were threatened.

The flash burns healed on Mrs. Maxwell’s face. But there was nothing to be done about her hand. Now all of her dresses had pockets. Harley said they were lined with rabbit fur. Sometimes her shattered hand found its way out of the pocket, when she wasn’t thinking. It waved or pointed or tried to pick something up. Then shock would appear on her face, maybe the same shock as when the gun’s jammed breech had burst, and the hand slipped quickly away.

“I wanted to talk with you, Benjamin.” She walked onto a Persian carpet in the middle of the room. “Come here and take off your shoes.”

“My shoes?” I thought about the black mud on her skin. I kept seeing Clarissa in her eyes and her mouth and her forehead.

“Come and walk on the carpet in your bare feet. This is how Mr. Maxwell bought his carpets. Not from the way they looked, but from the way they felt under his feet.”

I kicked off my shoes, rolled my socks into a ball, and walked out next to her. The carpet seemed to shift, bristly against my toes. A waste of time, I wanted to say. Let me be on my way now, so I can sleep without needing Dunhams to cremate my insides and so I can get the hell back on the rails.

Laughter reached through the closed windows. Harley got out of his chair, picked it up and threw it across the lawn. The chair rolled out of sight. The others applauded, three women and two men. They all stood and threw their chairs away. Harley stuffed a cigarette in his mouth. A woman held out a match. Harley bowed forward to the flame, cheeks tensed as he pulled in the smoke.

Mrs. Maxwell bounced slightly on the balls of her heels. “I wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your father.”

“Thank you.”

“Clarissa sends her best wishes. She has gone out for the day.”

I nodded. Clarissa. I couldn’t say the name anymore. It was like gnawing on steel wool.

“I wanted to talk to you about Harley. He has always thought of you as a good friend and his closest confidant.” Mrs. Maxwell was all out of focus. She was Clarissa for a second, until the age returned to her face.

I had been watching the pattern of the carpet, eyes following lines the way a squirrel runs from branch to branch in a tree. I tried to imagine Harley’s father tiptoeing barefoot across the design.

“Harley, as you know, is heir to a rather large sum of money.” She raised her eyebrows and the slapped expression of surprise appeared on her face, as if it was news to her, too. “What I am looking for, I should say we are looking for, is someone to handle Harley’s accounts. Now I understand that you are soon to be employed at a bank.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It was in the obituary.” Mrs. Maxwell walked to a red velvet couch and sat down. She sank so far into it that her knees almost banged against her chin. “We would like you to come and work for us. I believe we could do a little better for you than the bank.”

I imagined myself in a little room next to Thurkettle’s, writing out checks on all of Harley’s accounts. I thought of following him into New York City nightclubs, my pockets heavy with change for tipping waiters and busboys and hat-check men. I thought about having to be kind to Harley all the time, even when he was drunk and being an idiot. I glanced at Mrs. Maxwell, and it seemed to me she looked a little desperate, as if a battalion of people had already passed through here this morning, all of them receiving the same job offer and all of them refusing.

Harley and the others had moved to a different table. Now they were playing cards. Only the women were sitting. The men stood behind them, heads tucked in close to their necks, whispering advice and throwing bright red and blue chips out onto a pile.

“I do hope you will consider it, Benjamin. You see, as much as anything, we are anxious to find someone who might help Harley control his expenditures.” She smiled and Clarissa flickered again across her features. It was a witch’s smile. It could make you do anything, even spend your life helping Harley spend his money.

Something clacked against the window. It was Harley, tapping the glass with a poker chip and trying to see into the dark room. “Benjamin? Is that you? Is my mother holding you prisoner?” He pretended to blow a bugle and ran out of sight.

“I am so sorry about your father,” she whispered to me across the bristly red tundra of carpet.

Then the two huge doors swung open and Harley marched into the room. “I am liberating you, Benjamin. From the bonds,” he looked around. A poker chip slipped from one hand to the other, a hardened drop of blood between his palms. “Jesus, Mother, do you ever turn the lights on in here?”

Mrs. Maxwell didn’t answer. Her toes curled and uncurled on the carpet.

*   *   *

I walked with Harley down the lawn. We each dragged a chair.

The poker players fell silent when I walked past. The smiles froze on their faces.

“Was she giving you a lecture?” Harley set down his chair and slumped into it.

“No.” I watched a sailboat coming in to moor at the Maxwell’s dock. A man in a blue captain’s cap was pulling down the sails. He misjudged his approach to the dock and his bow thumped into the pilings.

“Yes she was, you liar.” Harley grinned and rummaged in his pockets for a cigarette. “She was trying to get you to work for her and stop me spending all the family’s money. It’s my fault. I made the mistake of calling you frugal at dinner a few nights ago.”

“I didn’t know I was frugal.” I sat down in my chair. Two women and the sailboat captain climbed out onto the dock.

The unlit cigarette wagged in Harley’s mouth. “Well, I suppose anyone looks frugal next to me.” He began patting his pockets for a match. “I hear your dad passed on. That’s very bad news. My dad died almost twenty years ago. He was an old man.”

The sailor was walking up the lawn. He wore white trousers with a blue blazer and had a gold anchor stitched to his cap. The two women had been swimming and wore towels wrapped around them.

They stopped when they reached where Harley and I were sitting.

The captain kept his hands balled in the pockets of his blue sports coat. “We were thinking of sailing over to Narragansett. I hear they’re racing horses on the beach.” Then he looked at me and nodded.

Harley swung his arm across my shoulder. “This is Benjamin Sheridan. He and I were at school together. He’s eligible!”

I looked down at my feet. “Oh, Jesus.”

One of the women laughed as if she had gone mad. Then she turned red and shut up. She bent down to me and kissed the air in front of my face. “I’ve heard Clarissa talk about you. Isn’t Sheridan a local name? Is your father the fire chief over on Jamestown?” Her face was starry with freckles.

“No. I think that must be someone else.”

When they had gone up to the house, Harley went back to patting his pockets. “Matches?”

I shook my head. “Is there anyone who doesn’t know I proposed to your sister last year?”

“Hell, I doubt it. She told just about everyone. My kingdom for a light.” Then he took out the cigarette and threw it away. “Why did you say your dad isn’t the fire chief when he is?”

“Because he’s not anymore. And besides, I know what it means to these people to have a father who’s a fire chief. It means nothing at all, and they’d just laugh about it. I’m tired of giving these people things to laugh about. And there’s another thing, Harley…”

“You can’t just abandon your family!” Harley’s forehead crumpled. You can’t deny who they are. I mean, look at me. I know I was a walking goddamn farce at university. I couldn’t have just shrugged off being the son of Albert Maxwell. People would have said I was a fraud. So I went the other way.” He stood up and spread his arms at the house. “I fucking went and wallowed in it!”

For a second, I saw him again in the smoke-foggy air of a university club called Rudolph’s. It was his birthday. He stood at the head of a table, drinking champagne from a trophy cup while the rest of us pounded on the table with our fists. The tables were deep carved with names, and when the wood became so hacked that the tables could no longer be used, they hung them from the walls instead. Harley kept drinking. Champagne dripped from his chin. Fists kept up the drumbeat until his cup was empty.

Harley’s arms were still spread. People on the terrace thought he was waving to them and waved back. “You can all go to hell,” he told them in a voice they couldn’t hear. “That’s right. Straight to hell.”

“The obituary didn’t say how my father died, did it?”

“It said he died in a fire.”

“He died when the doctor gave him a transfusion of my blood. It poisoned him. This means it’s almost impossible that he was actually my father.”

Harley scratched at his chin. “So your mother was a naughty girl.”

“The doctor said he couldn’t be sure. He said it was his guess because of the blood types that I was adopted. It means that my real father is probably still over in Ireland. Maybe my mother, too.” I put my hands in my pockets and looked up at the cloudless blue. “The priest on Jamestown said I should just forget about it, but I’ve alrady made up my mind to go to Ireland and find out.”

“You’ll get no peace until you do know. I can tell you that much just on instinct. You can’t leave your blood. It’s one thing to be adopted, and maybe you were. But not to know. Who could stand that? Your blood is running through somebody’s veins over in Ireland. If you try hiding that, either to others or to yourself, you’ll drive yourself mad before long. Even if the truth is bad, at least it’s there. I’d rather know that my father made his money selling useless guns that blew up in the soldiers’ faces and in my mother’s face than know nothing at all.”

“I’ve always thought that must be hard to live with.”

“It is. But it’s given me a purpose in life. It’s not even the guns that bother me so much. It’s that when my father was called up for duty in the Civil War, he did what was legal at the time and paid a man three hundred dollars to take his place. I remember him saying that at the end of the war the man came back to my father and asked for another three hundred dollars. My father told him that wasn’t in the contract and to leave before he called the police. I remember he said ‘Why should I pay you twice what we agreed?’ The man said ‘Because I was at Antietam.’ ‘So?’ my father yelled. And the man kept talking. ‘Because on that day the entire regiment that you were supposed to be in were running in a fixed-bayonet charge through a cornfield at the Confederate lines. None of us could see anything but cornstalks. Then suddenly we were out of the corn and in front of us were hundreds and hundreds of Rebel men in their butternut-colored clothes. They all had their guns raised and ready to fire. There were cannons too,’ the man said, ‘and then those men in butternut were gone all of a sudden behind smoke and the noise made me deaf and the regiment,
your
regiment, Mr. Maxwell, didn’t exist anymore.’ My father said to him, ‘I’m not paying you a damn thing.’

“So spending this family’s money the way I do is like a way of paying him myself. I’ll keep paying until it’s all gone.”

He was quiet after that, and I stood up to go. “I have to leave now, Harley.”

“Yes.” He wasn’t really listening. His mind was far away, running with the soldier through the cornfields of Antietam.

Thurkettle and I were just leaving the driveway, when I saw Clarissa walking toward us. She wore an off-white linen dress and was barefoot.

I had been saying something to Thurkettle, but when I caught sight of Clarissa, I fell silent. I waited too long, letting my vision blur around the paleness of her dress against the dark, waxy green of rhododendron bushes that lined the avenue. Strange how even now she seemed to live more clearly in my mind than when I saw her with my eyes.

I turned to ask Thurkettle just to please keep going, but Clarissa had already flagged down the car. She’d been across the road, at one of the other mansions. In her hand she carried a floppy Panama hat, with flowers woven into the brim. She laughed, and smiled as if there had never been any awkwardness between us. She leaned into the car and kissed my cheek and asked me how I was doing.

I didn’t remember what I said. Maybe nothing at all.

And I didn’t remember what she said, except that her last words to me were to take care of myself. It was as if she knew already that I was going far away. She smiled as if we were friends and would always be friends and maybe she believed it was true. I didn’t recall any mention of the death and was glad of that.

The way the light settled on her face reminded me of when I had given her swimming lessons the summer before. I held her body in waist-deep water, while she paddled at waves that crumbled all around us into foam.

Every time I saw her now, I thought of something in the past, even when she was standing there in front of me.

Then Thurkettle and I were driving on toward the ferry. I twisted in my seat to watch her disappear onto the chalky dazzle of the driveway at Belmar. I saw her body outlined through the linen of her dress as she walked past the iron gates. Then I faced forward again and saw how Thurkettle kept his gaze straight ahead at the road. I wanted to ask him what I’d said, but I kept quiet and his face gave nothing away.

We drove along the avenue of mansions. Sun flickered down through the trees.

It was not a mistake to fall in love with Clarissa. I didn’t blame myself for doing that. My mistake was trying to leave behind everything I had grown up with and burying it and expecting it all to stay buried. The reason I never introduced her to my father, although I always invented excuses to her and myself, was that I felt ashamed. I was proud of my father and his reputation on the island, but I knew it meant nothing to her and would never mean anything to her. And she never saw our house because in front of her I was ashamed of that, too. I never brought her out to meet my old friends from the island and I never talked about her to them. Even as I asked Clarissa to marry me, I had somehow convinced myself that none of these things mattered. The shame I felt then didn’t come close to the shame I felt now.