“Did you hear the man’s voice?”
Red stained Tom’s cheeks, visible beneath his tan. “Not saying words, anyway. I was trying not to listen.”
“But?” Charlie prompted.
“But,” Tom continued, “Charlie asked me tonight. She asked me whose voice it was I heard. And now that I think about, I don’t think it was Allen’s.”
Chapter 32
Charlie knew she should be tired, but she wasn’t. She hadn’t touched a drop of coffee, either. Three hours of sleep, and still she had managed several backward figure-eights. On skates, no less. She smiled to herself. If youth only knew, if age only could. Well, Tom had proved that age still could, despite all those commercials they had now for Viagra.
Charlie had so many memories of them together, back when they were both young. They hadn’t felt young, though, they had felt old. And next to the others, next to everyone except perhaps Allen, they had been old. Until Elizabeth died and forced everyone to grow up in a hurry.
That year was the turning point for the Lisacs. Allen came back from Korea maimed and quiet. Elizabeth had died, young and desperate. Walter, who had been a big bear of a man, with a barrel chest and a pipe – how long has it been since you saw a man with a pipe! – Walter started to dwindle away that fall, and by the next spring he was gone. Cancer eating him up inside. And a few months later, Austrid was dead, too, of a stroke.
Charlie had loved everything about Tom then, except for the way he acted around Warren. In the intervening years, Tom seemed to have grown surer of himself. He was his own man now, no one else’s.
Yesterday, when Tom came over for dinner, he had made it clear from the start that he wanted her. Wanted not just her body underneath him in bed, but her lips, her hands, her heart, her stories, her humors. They had scarcely touched their meal for talking. And then Claire and Dante came home, Claire oddly off balance, Dante withdrawn, but Charlie hadn’t had time to think about what it might all mean. After desert, they made coffee, and then Tom insisted on helping Charlie with the dishes. Every time he reached for a plate, her skin tingled at the slightest brush of his hand.
Was he an old man, she wondered, passions spent? Then they heard Claire and Dante going up the stairs. Without a word, Tom had taken her in his arms, not minding her wet hands at his neck, in his hair, on the small of his back.
She needn’t have worried. They were still themselves, still true inside the slightly shabbier clothes of their bodies. Later she was glad her room was a floor away from Claire’s.
Before she had left this morning, she kissed Tom full on the mouth on her own porch, not caring who saw. “I’ll come by tomorrow as soon as the market closes,” he told her when they finally broke apart. “I’ll bring you some of my fresh tomatoes and we can cook dinner together.”
Finding herself without the breath to speak, Charlie only nodded.
Tom grinned at her, his eyes caught in a web of wrinkles. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
For an answer, Charlie had kissed him again.
Chapter 33
1944
They are coming back from the day’s work when the command comes to run. Why? They don’t ask why. There is no time. Already the cudgel is descending on shoulders, arms, heads. One SS giggles as he hooks anyone who comes too close, his cane around the neck.
Schneller, schneller. Faster, faster.
Some maneuver to be in front of another who is weaker, to take her blows. Some get behind a woman no longer able to run, to hold her up if she begins to fall.
Some women fall.
Run. Keep running. No slowing down. No stopping. Do not even look at those who fall. Try to stay with one woman from your tier. It is impossible to look after the others.
Run, the guards and the kapos and the SS say, run.
So they do. Those who fall are not allowed to get up again. Those who turn to help, die also.
Chapter 34
LK2WTCH
Dante was still asleep – or pretending to be - when Claire slipped out of bed. Her teeth seemed to be wearing little mittens. With every beat of her heart, someone hammered a nail into her right temple. When would she ever learn that she couldn’t handle more than two drinks? She grabbed her workout bag and went downstairs. Dante’s breathing didn’t change, but she thought he might be awake.
Her regular five-mile run, even if she ended up walking the majority of it, would clear her head. At least Claire hoped so. At a minimum, it would get her out of the house and give her a chance to pull her thoughts together before she had to talk to Dante. Yesterday she had screwed up, big time, and now she had to figure out what to do about it.
The house was quiet. Claire knew that Charlie must have already left for one of her twice-weekly ice-skating sessions at Valley Ice. Claire pictured Charlie stroking calmly around the rink. Her hands would be clasped behind her back, the sound of her blades like knives on a whetstone. Claire was sorry the older woman was gone. She would have welcomed Charlie’s insights and advice.
As she ran, Claire thought about what Tom had said the night before. Had Elizabeth really been having sex with someone else besides Allen? And if so, whose child had she been carrying? As beautiful as Elizabeth had been, she probably could have had her pick of lovers. But everyone had agreed that she was also an innocent. Or had that been a façade?
In addition to puzzling out the past, Claire also had the problems of the present to keep her occupied. What was she going to do to clean up the mess she had made with Dante? Or for Dante? Would Mary Lisac end up telling her husband who Claire really was? And if she did, would it cause Allen to look at Dante in a new light? As far as Claire could tell, Allen had truly liked Dante, and he had liked Dante’s connections to the world’s finest museums even more. And Dante seemed very interested in Allen’s collection, and not nearly as interested in what had happened to its donor’s dead fiancée.
Claire crested the hill and began the long gradual descent. A block away, a group of kids waited at a school bus stop. One child stood apart from all the rest, a black boy who looked about ten. The other half dozen kids clustered together, silent and staring, watching the lone boy. His hands were balled into fists and his face was empty. Claire could feel the tension stretching between them. Had she interrupted teasing, taunting, the beginnings of a fight? There were so few black kids in this section of Portland that she wouldn’t be surprised if he were subject to trouble. She slowed down, ready to jump in to help.
The boy took one step back, another, his eyes never leaving the faces of his tormentors. Then he leapt up in the air, his body twisting like a fish. Almost quicker than Claire’s eye could follow, he flipped once, twice, three times, his feet barely touching the sidewalk before his hands followed after. After his third flip, the other kids crowded around, laughing and slugging him on the shoulder in admiration, not even taking notice of Claire as she ran by.
What other things had she seen and not understood, Claire wondered as she automatically turned and ran up the street where the Lisacs and Howard Backus lived, side-by-side. Had she been too quick to pass judgment on Allen Lisac?
In his driveway, Howard was polishing his car, which looked more like an inflated balloon than an aerodynamic machine. Would such a beast require leaded gasoline? And where would you get it? Although come to think of it, Claire had never actually seen Howard driving the car, just tinkering with it.
He smiled and waved at her. When she waved back, he motioned her to come over. She pulled her headphones down until they circled her throat like a necklace. She looked over at the Lisacs’, but the curtains were drawn, the garage doors closed.
“Out for a run?” His big eyes gave her the once over.
Claire stifled a groan at the way his gaze oozed over her. “Yes, so I can only stop for a minute.”
“Is everything okay at your house? I’ve been worried about Charlie because of those hate crimes.”
“Charlie? The only thing she’s worried about is me go
ing running, but I don’t think skinheads are the type to get up early.”
Howard ran his hand through his hair and straightened up. “But she’s Jewish. Who knows who they’ll target next?”
Claire hadn’t even thought that Charlie’s being Jewish would put her at risk. Although come to think of it, when she had last lifted weights, there had been more security guards than usual at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. But Jews were so used to being targets that they tended to err on the side of caution.
“Oh, I think we’ll be fine. These seem more like crimes of opportunity, kids who get drunk and go out looking for someone who looks different and is by themselves. I can’t imagine anyone attacking a little old Jewish lady who never leaves the house at night.”
Howard nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced. “I hope you’re right.” His mouth was still twisted with worry, reminding Claire of how distraught he had been talking about Elizabeth’s death. An idea occurred to her – could Howard have been Elizabeth’s secret lover? With his job as a teacher, Howard would have been free during the afternoons and summer months, free to press his suit with Elizabeth. Maybe the reason Tom hadn’t seen a car the day he heard someone making love to Elizabeth was because her lover had simply walked next door. She could imagine Howard as Elizabeth’s lover, but she found it hard to believe, face to face with this frail old man in the clear morning light, that he could be a killer.
“Charlie was telling me how much you liked Elizabeth,” Claire ventured. “Really liked her. It must have been hard on you when she got engaged to Allen.”
“That was a long time ago.” Howard’s face went still and expressionless. “Elizabeth and I were never more than just friends.” He looked at her sharply, and she knew he had guessed what she had been thinking. “I didn’t know if she could be happy with Allen, that’s all. Their personalities were very different. It was Warren Lisac who thought it up. Getting married to Elizabeth was a lot more his idea than Allen’s.”
In the tree above them, a bird sang, the pure, piercing notes temporarily louder than the tinny music floating up from Claire’s headphones. Howard’s expression lightened into a smile. He cocked his head, turning in a small circle until he spotted the source of the sound. “A Western Tanager,” he announced. Claire finally saw what he was focused on, a small bird with a red head and black and yellow body.
“Are you a what-do-you-call-it, a birder?” Claire asked. “I saw the bird book in your house.” And binoculars, she realized. And a clear view of the Lisacs’ house. Had Howard ever been tempted to train those lenses a little lower, to watch the woman he claimed had never been more than his friend? Or had he perhaps been like Tom, an unseen observer as someone made love to Elizabeth?
Howard’s face brightened. “Yes, I belong to the Audubon Society. This weekend we went on a field trip and I spotted an ibis at Bingen Pond in Klickitat County. They said it was the first record for an ibis for that county. The trip put me up to the three hundred species mark on my lifetime birding list.”
Claire nodded absently, not really hearing the details of what he said. She was still turning over all the possible ways Howard and Elizabeth’s lives might have intersected, 50 years ago. Finally, she realized Howard had stopped speaking and was regarding her curiously. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“That’s all right. I was just saying you and Charlie should come over for a visit again. I’ve got some marvelous illustrations of native birds that were drawn around the turn of the century. And don’t just think I’m some randy old guy asking you to look at his etchings. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a painted bunting. And you can bring your boyfriend. I hear he likes old drawings. Mary tells me he is up for a job at the Oregon Art Museum.”
Claire realized she had been thinking of Howard and Allen and Mary as if they led separate lives, when really they lived cheek by jowl. “You must talk to her and Allen a lot, being neighbors and all.”
An expression she couldn’t quite interpret crossed Howard’s face. “Not really. Not as much as you might think. You know. They’re busy. Allen and Mary have their own lives.”
He looked so lonely and pathetic standing there that Claire began to doubt all her previous speculation. Howard with his birds and his notebooks suddenly struck Claire as more of a voyeur, the kind of guy who would rather watch, than risk making a move. All these years of flirting with women, yet he had never married. Or had his heart been broken when Elizabeth died?
On the way home, Claire had to detour around the body of a crow. It had been run over so many times that the flesh had been stripped from the carcass. All that was left were black feathers, and white bones, the wings outstretched as if a taxidermist had wired it for display.
Looking at it made Claire wonder why she didn’t see more dead animals when she was out running. In the last few weeks, she had seen two dead squirrels, one rat, and three dead crows, but they were the exception. Usually she could go months without seeing any dead thing. But why not? It wasn’t like there was someone to spirit them away and put them in the ground, mumble a few words over them. Maybe the carcasses were scavenged by the coyotes that roamed these hills at night, as comfortable as neighborhood dogs. Probably any animal that got sick just hunkered down in a bush somewhere, hid itself in its weakness, waited for the bad feelings to pass. Not knowing that in a few weeks it would be reduced to nothing more than scattered bones.
Chapter 35
That first year after, Charlie bathed twice, sometimes three times a day. She would scrub her body with a nailbrush and fine French-milled soap scented with lilacs.
And still she could smell it on her skin, the odor of the camp, of sewage and carrion.
Chapter 36
N2ISHN
As she ran across the imaginary finish line made up of the edge of her driveway, Claire hit the stop button on the built-in stopwatch on her wristwatch. Forty-one minutes, seven seconds – an excellent time for a five-mile run, especially considering she had a hangover. While stopping to talk to Howard had probably let her catch a second wind, she decided not to let the idea detract from the pride she felt. Hands on hips, Claire began to walk in circles, cooling down.
As she did, a car came up the street. The driver looked like a leftover hippie, with a gray ponytail. His mouth fell open as he stared at the side of Charlie’s house. He slowed nearly to a stop, rolling down his window. His face was a mask of shock. Claire’s heart was already beating faster, as she guessed that in the next few moments everything would change, even if she didn’t know how. Was the house on fire? Her thoughts flashed to Dante, still asleep.
“I am so sorry!”
“Sorry? About what?” Claire felt off-balance.
“Those words!” He must have seen how blank she was. “Don’t you know? Someone spray-painted your house!”
She ran to the other side of the house. The whole side of the house was defaced with black dripping spray paint letters a foot high. “Die Jew!” “Christien Nation!” “Go back to Izreal!””
In shock, Claire found herself focusing on the misspelling rather than the sentiments they represented. Did the mistakes make the words less dangerous – or more?
The skating rink lay in the other direction, and Claire guessed that Charlie hadn’t yet seen how the house had been defaced. For that she was grateful. Was there any extra house paint in the basement? Could she cover the slogan up before Charlie got home? Every word would wound her friend.
Four or five more drivers went past, each of them gawking. A young woman with pink hair walking a yellow lab crossed the street and hugged Claire, not seeming to mind that she was covered in sweat. A dozen rings circled the rim of each ear. Claire had never seen the woman before in her life.
“Oh my God! That’s just awful. Do you know who did this? What do the police say?”
“The police?” Claire realized how sluggishly her thoughts were moving, shocked into near immobility. “I just found out about this myself. I need t
o go call.”
When she saw a strange man in the kitchen, Claire came to a dead stop, her hand still on the doorknob. The man had his back to her and a knife in his hand. Then she realized it was only Tom, dressed in the same clothes he had worn the night before, and let out her breath in a pent-up rush. He started and turned, his hand still gripping the knife, a neat hill of slice mushrooms on the cutting board behind him.
“Tom, where’s Dante?”
Tom must have read something in her face. “He left a note saying he’d taken a taxi to the museum. Why? What’s wrong?”
“I have to call the police. Someone spraypainted our house last night.”
“What?” He looked more puzzled than afraid.
“Threats about Charlie being a Jew.”
Tom put down the knife and made for the door while Claire dialed 9-1-1.
###
Graffiti, it turned out, was not a high priority crime. Claire had the feeling it might have fallen off the list completely if it had been a simple tag or two. But the words themselves elevated it to a hate crime. They sent a beat cop to look at it, who in turned called for a criminalist to gather what little evidence there was.
While they waited for the criminalist or Charlie to come, Claire and Tom went back in the house, seeking a reprieve from the stares and the questions and comments of passers-by, however kind.