Great House

  With great difficulty I managed to drag myself down to the hotel bar for a gin and tonic to calm myself. The only other drinkers were two old women, sisters, I think, perhaps even twins, perilously frail, their hands deformed around their glasses. Ten minutes after I’d arrived, one got up, departing so slowly she might have been performing a pantomime, leaving the other alone, until at last the second one vacated her spot just as slowly, like some demented version of the Von Trapps exiting to the tune of “So Long, Farewell,” and as she passed me she swiveled her head and gave me a terrifying grin. I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.

  When I returned to Room 29 an hour later the air itself seemed to have taken on a sickening floral odor. I dug out the number Gottlieb had given me from my bag. I dialed and a woman answered. May I speak to Mrs. Elsie Fiske? I asked. Speaking. Really? I almost said, because no small part of me still held out for the possibility that Gottlieb’s detective work would lead to a dead end, and that I would return home to London, to my garden and books and the grudging company of the tomcat, having tried and failed to find Lotte’s child. Hello? she said. I’m sorry, I said, this is bound to be awkward. I don’t mean to throw you off guard, but I was hoping to discuss with you a rather personal matter. Who is this? My name is Arthur Bender. My wife—this really is very awkward, forgive me, I assure you I don’t wish to make you uncomfortable in any way, but some time ago my wife died and I learned that she had a child I never knew about. A boy she gave up for adoption in June 1948. There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line. I cleared my throat. Her name was Lotte Berg—I began to say, but she cut in. What is it you want, exactly, Mr. Bender? I don’t know what possessed me to speak so frankly, perhaps something in the tone of her voice, the clarity or intelligence I thought I heard in it, but what I said was, If I were to answer that question honestly, Mrs. Fiske, I might have you on the phone all night. To be as straightforward as possible, I’ve come to Liverpool and I wondered if it would not be too much of an imposition to ask to meet you, and perhaps, if you come to think it would be all right, to meet your son. There was another pause, a pause that seemed to go on a long time as the vegetation unfurled and advanced along the walls. He’s dead, she said simply. He’s been dead twenty-seven years.

  The night was long. The heat in the room was unbearable, and from time to time I would get up to open the window, only to remember that it was sealed shut. I threw all of the covers onto the floor and lay spread-eagle on the mattress, inhaling the heat rising off the radiator, a heat that infected my dreams like a tropical fever. They were dreams beyond language, grotesque images of raw, wet, bloated flesh strung up in black nets, and white bags that secreted a slow colorless drip echoing off the floor, images from the nightmares of my childhood at last come back to me, even more horrifying now than they were then since I grasped, in that semi-hallucinatory state, that they could only belong to my death. We have to draw some distinctions, I repeated over and over in my head, or not I but a disembodied voice that I took to be my own. But there was one dream that stood apart from that monstrous parade, a simple dream of Lotte on a beach, drawing long lines with her bony toe in the sand while I watched, lying back on my elbows in the body of a much younger man which I sensed, like a nimbus at the edge of that bright day, didn’t belong to me. When I woke, the blow of her absence made me gag. I stood gulping from the bathroom tap, and when I tried to urinate there was only a drip and a burning sensation, as if I were trying to pass sand, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the way news of oneself so often arrives, it dawned on me what a ridiculous thing it was to have dedicated one’s life to being a scholar of the so-called Romantic poets. I proceeded to flush the toilet. I took a shower, dressed, and checked out of the hotel. When the receptionist asked if everything had been to my satisfaction I smiled and said that it had been.

  A long walk in the hours after dawn, of which I remember little. Only that I arrived at the house before nine, though Elsie Fiske had asked me for ten. All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. It was a two-story terraced house, indistinguishable from the others on the road apart from the number next to its front door—the same dull lace curtains, the same iron rail. It was drizzling, and I walked up and down the opposite side of the street to stay warm. Something about the sight of the lace curtains filled me with a sickening guilt. The boy was dead, the story I’d asked Mrs. Fiske to tell would end badly. All those years Lotte had kept from me the story of her child. However he had haunted her, he had not been allowed to intrude on our lives. On our happiness, I should say, since that was always ours. Like a strongman under an enormous weight, she’d borne her silence alone. It was a work of art, her silence. And now I was going to destroy it.

  At ten o’clock sharp I rang the bell. The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn’t really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable.

  I thought I saw the curtains move but it was some time before anyone came to the door. At last I heard footsteps and the lock turned. The woman who stood there had very long gray hair, hair that must have gone all the way down her back when it was loose, but which she had plaited and coiled on top of her head in the style of one who had just stepped off a stage where she’d been performing Chekhov. She had a very erect carriage and little gray eyes.

  She showed me into the living room. Right away, I knew that her husband had died and that she lived alone there. Perhaps a person who lives on his own has a special sense for the shades, tones, and peculiar echoes of that life. She gestured to the tasseled sofa decorated with an abundance of crocheted pillows, all of which, as far as I could tell, pictured various species of dogs and cats. I took a seat among them; one or two slipped onto my lap and nestled there. I proceeded to stroke a little black stuffed dog on the head. On the table, Mrs. Fiske had laid out a pot of tea and a plate of digestives, though for a long time she didn’t move to pour it, and by the time she did the tea was too strong. I don’t remember how we began to talk. I only remember that I made the acquaintance of that stuffed little dog, a spaniel of some kind, and then Mrs. Fiske and I were deep into conversation, a conversation that both of us had been waiting a long time to have, though neither had known it. There was very little (or so it seemed, sitting in that room that I soon realized was filled with canine and feline likenesses of every kind, not just the pillows but the figurines that crowded the shelves and the paintings on the wall) that we couldn’t say to each other, even if we did not choose to say it all, and yet it wasn’t intimacy that existed between us, certainly not warmth, but something more desperate. At no time did we ever address each other as anything but Mr. Bender and Mrs. Fiske.

  We spoke of husbands and wives, of the death of her husband eleven years earlier, who had gone by a heart attack while singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the football stadium, of the hats and scarves and shoes of the dead that keep turning up, diminishing powers of concentration, letters returned in the mail, of train travel, of standing over graves, of all the ways that life can be squeezed out of the human body, at least I have the impression now that we spoke of these things though I admit it is possible we spoke of the difficulty of growing lavender in a wet climate, and that those other things were only the subtext, so clearly understood between Mrs. Fiske and me. But I don’t think so, I don’t think we discussed lavender or gardens at all. The bitter tea grew cold, despite the tea cozy. A few strands of Mrs. Fiske’s gray hair came loose from arrangements made earlier.

  You have to un
derstand, she said at last. I was thirty by the time I met John, and some weeks earlier I had caught sight of myself in the reflection of a shop window before I had a chance to compose my face, and afterwards, on the bus ride home, I came to accept certain things. It was not a revelation, she said, it was more a question of things having reached a certain point, and the image I saw reflected back at me was the last straw. Not long after that, I was at my sister’s and her husband brought a friend back from the office. John and I found ourselves trying to pass one another in the narrow hall that led to the kitchen, pass without touching, and he asked, rather awkwardly, whether he could see me again. The first night he took me out I was taken aback by how, when he laughed, you could see his fillings, and also the darkness gathered at the back of the throat. He had a way of throwing his head back and opening his mouth to laugh that took me some time to get used to. I was what you might call the solemn type, Mrs. Fiske said, looking past me out of the window, solemn and shy, and despite the music of his laughter I was frightened by what I thought I saw there at the back of his throat. But we found our way with one another, and were married five months later in front of a small group of family and friends, many of whom were surprised to find themselves there, having come to believe that I would become an old maid, if I wasn’t one in their eyes already. I made it clear to John that I didn’t want to waste any time before trying to have a child. We tried, but it didn’t come easily. When at last I became pregnant—this is strange to say—the sensation I had was of a tide washing in and out of me, and when the tide came in the child was safe within me, and when it washed out it was the child being pulled away from me, as if he had seen something bright and shining elsewhere, and no matter how I tried to hold him back I couldn’t. The pull of that other thing, that other, shining life, was too hard to resist. And then one night asleep in bed I felt the tide wash out of me for good, and when I woke I was bleeding. We tried again after that, but deep down I no longer believed I was capable of bearing a child. Those were painful times for me, and if normally I laughed little now I laughed hardly at all, but I remember thinking that John’s laughter remained constant. It isn’t that he wasn’t saddened, but he had a merry disposition, he could turn a corner and see things from another angle, or hear a joke on the radio and that was enough for him. And when he laughed, throwing his head back, the darkness at the back of his throat seemed to me even more foreboding than before, and a little shiver ran through me. I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. He was very supportive, and did his best to cheer me up. In a way I can’t explain, said Mrs. Fiske, the darkness I saw there had nothing, or very little, to do with John himself and everything to do with me; the back of his throat just happened to be the place where it dwelled. I began to turn away when he laughed so as not to see it, and then one day I heard his laughter switch off like a light, and when I turned back his mouth was clamped shut and there was a look of shame on his face. I felt awful then, cruel, really, absurd and self-absorbed, and soon afterwards I made sure that things began to change between us. By and by a kind of tenderness was allowed in that had not been before. I learned something about controlling certain kinds of feelings, about not giving in to the first emotion that presents itself, and I remember thinking at the time that such discipline was the key to sanity. About six months later we decided to adopt a child.

  Mrs. Fiske leaned forward and stirred what was left of her tea as if she might drink it, or as if the words for the rest of her story were resting among the bits of tea leaves at the bottom of the china cup. But then she seemed to think better of it, returned the cup to its saucer, and leaned back again in her chair.

  It didn’t happen right away, she said. We had to fill out endless forms, there was a process. One day a lady in a yellow suit came to our house. I remember staring at her suit and thinking that it was like a small piece of sunshine, and she an envoy from a different climate where children thrived and were happy, and that she had arrived at our house to shine herself and see how it looked, how so much light and happiness might reflect back off of our colorless walls. I spent the days before her arrival on my knees scrubbing the floors. I even baked a cake on the morning of her arrival so that there would be the smell of something sweet in the air. I wore a blue silk dress and made John wear a houndstooth jacket that he’d never have chosen for himself, because I thought it had an optimistic flair. But as we sat waiting uneasily for her in the kitchen I saw how the sleeves were too short and how the jacket, the way John sat hunched in that ridiculous jacket, instead gave away our desperation. But it was too late to change, the doorbell rang, and there she was with her patent-leather bag containing our file tucked under her arm, this bright yellow guardian from the land of tiny fingernails and milk teeth. She sat down at the table and I put a slice of cake in front of her, which she didn’t touch. She took out some papers for us to sign, and proceeded to conduct her interview. John, who was easily intimidated by authority, began to stutter. Embarrassed and insecure, cowed by the power she had over us, I lost my way in the answers I tried to give, became flustered, and made a fool of myself. As she looked around, an artificial little smile pulled tightly at her lips, I saw her shiver, and I realized that the house was cold. I knew then that she would not give us a child.

  After that I entered into what I suppose is called a depression, though I didn’t know it then. When I emerged many months later, I’d accustomed myself to the idea of a life without children. Then one day, visiting my sister who had moved to London, I was reading the paper and my eye happened to catch a small ad near the bottom of the page. I could have easily missed it, it was just a few words in small print. But I saw it: Baby boy of three weeks available for immediate adoption. Below it was an address. Without hesitating, I took out a piece of paper and wrote a letter. Something took hold of me. My pen hurried across the page, trying to keep up with the words pouring out of me. I wrote all I’d been unable to express to the lady in yellow who had come from the adoption agency, and as the letters flew off the point of my pen I knew that ad had been meant for me alone. The boy for me alone. I posted the letter, and said nothing about it to John. I didn’t want to put him through more than I had already; having seen me through the worst of my depression only to watch me fall prey to blind hope, again, would be more than he could bear. But I knew it wasn’t blind hope. Sure enough, as soon as I returned home to Liverpool a few days later, a letter was waiting for me. It was signed with only her initials: L.B. Until you called last night, I never knew her name. She asked me to meet her five days later, at four o’clock on the 18th of July, in the ticket hall at West Finchley Station. I waited until John left for work at eight and then I hurried out on my way. I was going to meet my child, Mr. Bender. The one I had waited so long for. Can you imagine what I felt, stepping aboard that train? I could barely sit still. I knew I was going to call him Edward, after the grandfather I’d loved. Of course he must have had a name already, but I didn’t think to ask, and she didn’t tell me. We said so little. I could barely speak and neither could she. Or perhaps she could have spoken, but chose not to. Yes, I think it was that. There was a strange calmness about her—it was my hands that shook. Only later, during those first days, with the house filled with the smells of a new baby, did I think about that other name hiding behind the name we had given him, like a shadow. But in time I forgot about it, or if I didn’t entirely forget it I rarely thought of it, except at odd moments when I would hear a name being called on the street, in a shop, or on the bus, and I would stop and wonder if that was it.