And then he was gone, back to whatever sea glittered in his eyes.
IV
Need I tell you that Galilee did not come back the following night as he’d promised? This despite the fact that I spent most of the day seeking an audience with Cesaria in order to plead his case. In fact, I failed to find her (I suspect she knew my purpose, and was deliberately avoiding me). But anyway, he didn’t turn up, which I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at. He always had an unreliable nature, except in matters of the heart, where everyone else is unreliable. There he was divinely constant.
I told Marietta what had transpired, but she already knew. From Luman, who had happened to see me there by the swamp, apparently having a conversation with a shadow, and passing through so many moods, he said, that he knew I could only be talking to one person.
“He guessed it was Galilee?” I said.
“No, he didn’t guess,” Marietta said. “He knew because he had conversations like that himself.”
“You mean Galilee’s been here before?” I said.
“So it seems,” she said. “Many times, in fact.”
“At Luman’s invitation?”
“I assume so. He wouldn’t confirm it either way. You know how he gets when he thinks he’s being interrogated. Anyway it doesn’t really matter whether Luman invited him or not, does it? The point is, he was here.”
“Not in the house though,” I said. “He was too afraid of mother to go near the house.”
“He told you that?”
“You don’t believe it?”
“I think it’s perfectly possible he’s been spying on us all for years without our knowing it. The little shit.”
“I think he prefers the word divinity.”
“How about divine little shit?” Marietta said.
“Do you really dislike him so much?”
“I don’t dislike him at all. It’s nothing so simple. But we both know our lives would have been a damn sight happier if he’d never come home that night.”
That night. I must tell you about that night, sometime soon. I’m not being deliberately coy, you understand. But it’s not easy. I’m not entirely certain I know what happened the night Galilee came home. There were more visions and fevers and acts of delirium at work that night than had been unleashed on this continent since the arrival of the Pilgrims. I could not tell you with any certainty what was real and what was illusion.
No, that’s a lie. There are some things I’m certain of. I know who died that night, for one thing: the desperate men who made the mistake of accompanying Galilee onto this sacred ground, and paid the price of trespass. I could take you to their graves right now, though I haven’t ventured near them in a hundred and thirty years. (Even as I write this the face of one of these men, a man called Captain Holt, comes into my mind’s eye. I can see him in his grave, his form in such disarray it seemed every bone in his body, even to the littlest, had been shattered.)
What else am I certain of? That I lost the love of my life that night. That I saw her in my father’s arms—oh Lord, that’s a sight that I’ve prayed to have removed from me; but who listens to the prayers of a man sinned against by God?—and that she looked at me in her last moments and I knew she’d loved me, and I would never be loved with such ferocity again. All this I know is incontestably true. If you like, it’s history.
But the rest? I couldn’t tell you whether it was real or not. There was so much high emotion unleashed that night, and in a place such as this rage and love and sorrow do not remain invisible. They exist here as they existed at the beginning of the world, as those primal forces from which we lesser things take our purpose and our shape.
That night—with senses raw and skins stripped—we moved in a flood of visible feeling, which made itself into a thousand fantastic forms. I don’t expect to see such a spectacle ever again; nor do I particularly want to. For every part of my being that comes from my father, and takes pleasure in chaos for its own sake, there is a part that makes me my mother’s child, and wants tranquility; a place to write and think and dream of heaven. (Did I tell you that my mother was a poet? No, I don’t believe I did. I must quote you some of her work, later.)
So, after all my claiming I could not find the courage to describe that night, I just gave you a taste of it. There’s so much more to tell, of course, and I’ll tell it as time goes by. But not just yet. These things have to be done by degrees.
Trust me; when you know all there is to know, you’ll wonder that I was even able to begin.
V
i
Where did I last leave Rachel? On the road, was it?, heading back into Manhattan contemplating the relative merits of Neil Wilkens and her husband?
Oh yes, and then thinking that they were both in their secret hearts sad men, and wondering why. (My own theory is that Neil and Mitch were in no way unusual; that they were unhappy in their souls because many men, perhaps even most, are unhappy in their souls. We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.)
Anyway, she came back into Manhattan determined to tell her husband that she could not bear to live as his wife a moment longer, and it was time for them to part. She hadn’t worked out the exact words she’d use; she preferred to trust to the moment.
That moment was delayed by a day. Mitchell had left for Boston the night before, she was told by Ellen, one of Mitchell’s phalanx of secretaries. Rachel felt a twinge of anger that he’d departed this way; wholly irrational, of course, given that she’d done precisely the same thing a few days earlier. She called the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, where he always stayed. Yes, he was a guest there, she was informed; but no, he wasn’t in. She left a short message, telling him she was back at the apartment. He was obsessive about messages, she knew, usually picking them up on the hour, every hour. The fact that he didn’t call back could only mean that he was choosing not to speak to her; punishing her, in other words. She resisted the temptation to call him again. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of imagining her doing exactly what she was doing, sitting by the phone waiting for him to call her back.
About two in the morning, just as she’d finally fallen asleep, he returned the call. His manner was suspiciously convivial.
“Have you been partying?’ she asked him.
“Just a few friends,” he replied. “Nobody you’d know. Harvard guys.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not quite sure yet. Thursday or Friday.”
“Is Garrison with you?”
“No. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“I’m having some fun if that’s what you’re getting at,” Mitch said, his tone losing its warmth, “I’m sick of being a workhorse, just so that everybody stays rich.”
“Don’t do it for me,” she said.
“Oh don’t start that—”
“I mean it. I—”
“—was quite happy with nothing,” he said, doing a squeaky imitation of her voice.
“Well I was.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Rachel. All I said was, I was working too hard . . .”
“So that we could all stay rich, you said.”
“Don’t be so fucking sensitive.”
“Don’t swear at me.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“I told you, I’ve been partying. I don’t have to apologize for that. Look, I don’t want to have this conversation anymore. We’ll talk when I get back.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“I said I’d come Thursday or Friday.”
“We’ve got to have a proper conversation, Mitch, and we’ve got to have it sooner rather than later.”
“A conversation about what?”
“About us. About what we do. We can’t go on like this.”
There was a long, long silence. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said finally.
ii
While Rachel and Mitchel
l played out their melancholy domestic drama, there were other events occurring, none of them so superficially noteworthy as the separation of lovers, which would in the long term prove to have far more tragic consequences.
You’ll remember, perhaps, that I made mention in passing of Loretta’s astrologer? I don’t know whether the fellow was a fake or not (though I have to think that any man who sells his services as a prophet to rich women is not driven by any visionary ambition). I do know, however, that his predictions proved—after a labyrinthine fashion that will become apparent over the course of the next several chapters—to become true. Would they have done so had he kept them to himself? Or was his very speaking of them part of the great plot fate was laying against the Gearys? Again, I cannot say. All I can do is tell you what happened, and leave the rest to your good judgment.
Let me begin with Cadmus. The week Rachel returned from Dansky was good for the old man. He managed a short car trip out to Long Island, and had spent a couple of hours sitting on the beach there, looking out at the ocean. Two days later one of his old enemies, a congressman by the name of Ashfield who had attempted to start an investigation into the Gearys’ business practices in the forties, had died of pneumonia, which had quite brightened Cadmus’s day. The illness had been painful, sources reported, and Ashfield’s final hours excruciating. Hearing this, Cadmus had laughed out loud. The next day he announced to Loretta that he intended to make a list of all the people who’d attempted to get in his way over the years whom he’d now outlived. Then he wanted her to send it into The Times, for the obituary column: a collective in memoriam for those who would never cross his path again. The conceit had gone out of his head an hour later, but his lively mood remained. He stayed up well past his usual bedtime often, and demanded a vodka martini as a nightcap. It was as he sipped it, sitting in his wheelchair looking out on the city, that he said:
“I heard a rumor . . .”
“What about?” Loretta said.
“You saw that astrologer of yours.”
“Yes.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Are you sure you should finish that martini, Cadmus? You’re not supposed to drink on your medications.”
“Actually, it’s rather a pleasant feeling,” he said, his voice a little slurred. “You were telling me about the astrologer. He told you something grim, I gather.”
“You don’t believe any of that stuff anyway,” Loretta said. “So why the hell does it matter?”
“Was it that terrible?” Cadmus inquired. He studied his wife’s face woozily. “What in God’s name did he say, Loretta?”
She sighed. “I don’t think—”
“Tell me!” he roared.
Loretta stared at him, amazed that a sound so solid could emanate from a body so frail.
“He said something was about to change all our lives,” Loretta replied. “And that I should be ready for the worst.”
“The worst being what exactly?”
“I suppose death.”
“Mine?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Because if it’s mine . . .” he reached out and took her hand “ . . . that’s not the end of the world. I feel quite ready to be off somewhere restful.” His hand went up to her face. “My only concern is you. I know how you hate to be alone.”
“I won’t be long following you,” Loretta said softly.
“Oh now hush. I won’t hear that. You’ve got a good long life ahead of you.”
“Not without you I don’t.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve made very good financial arrangements for you. You’ll never want for anything.”
“It’s not money I’m worried about.”
“What then?”
She reached for her cigarettes, fumbling with the packet a moment. “Is there something about this family you’ve never told me?’ she said.
“Oh I’m sure there’s a thousand things,” Cadmus remarked blithely.
“I’m not talking about a thousand things, Cadmus,” Loretta said. “I’m talking about something important. Something you’ve kept from me. And don’t lie to me, Cadmus. It’s too late for lies.”
“I’m not lying to you,” he said. “I meant what I said: there are a thousand things I haven’t told you about this family, but none of them, sweet, I swear, none of them is very terrible.” Loretta looked somewhat placated. Smiling and stroking her hand, Cadmus quickly capitalized on his success. “Every family has a few unfortunates in its midst. We’ve got those. My own mother died miserably. But you know that. There was some business done in the Depression that doesn’t reflect well on me, but—” he shrugged “—the Good Lord seems to have forgiven me. He granted me beautiful children and grandchildren, and a longer, healthier life than I ever dared hope I’d have. And most of all, He gave me you.” He tenderly kissed Loretta’s hand. “And believe me, darling, when I tell you there’s not a day goes by without my thanking Him for His generosity.”
That was more or less the end of the conversation. But it was only the beginning of the consequences of the astrologer’s prediction.
The following day, when Loretta was out at her monthly lunch with several philanthropic widows of Manhattan, the old man wheeled himself into the library, locked the door, and took from a certain hiding place behind the rows of leather-bound tomes, all undisturbed by any curious reader, a small metal box, bound with a thin leather thong. His fingers were too weak to untie the knot, so he took a pair of scissors to it, and then lifted the lid. If anyone had witnessed him doing this they would have assumed the box contained some priceless treasure, his manner was so reverential. They would have been disappointed. There was nothing glorious in the box. Just a small book that smelled brown with age, its cover stained, its pages stained, the handwritten lines upon those stained pages faded with the years. And between the pages, here and there, loose sheets of paper, a small fragment of blue cloth, a skeletal leaf that went to motes of gray dust when he tried to pick it up.
He roved back and forth through the book perhaps half a dozen times, pausing for a moment to study the contents of a page, then moving on.
Only when he’d examined it this way did he return to one of the pieces of loose paper and remove it, unfolding it with such delicacy it might have been a living thing—a butterfly perhaps, whose wings he wanted to admire without doing the creature harm.
It was a letter. The hand it was written in was elegant, but the mind shaping the words more eloquent still, the thoughts so compressed it read less like prose than poetry.
My dearest brother, it said. The great griefs of the day have passed, and through the twilight, all pink and gold, I hear the tender music of sleep.
The philosophers are misled, I have come to believe, when they teach us that sleep is death’s similitude. It is rather a nightward journey back into our mother’s arms, where we may be blessed to hear the lovely rhythm of a slumber song.
I hear it now, even as I write these words to you. And though our mother has been dead a decade, I am returned to her, and she to me, and the world is good again.
Tomorrow, we do battle at Bentonville, and are so greatly outnumbered there is no hope of victory. So forgive me if I do not tell you I long to embrace you, for I entertain no such hope, at least in this world.
Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. And if your prayers are answered, perhaps also the best.
I have ever loved thee.
The letter was signed Charles.
Cadmus studied it for more than a little time; especially the penultimate paragraph. The words made him shake. Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. There was nothing in this library, in all the great, grim masterworks of the world, that had the power to distress him that these words possessed. He’d not known the letter-writer personally, of course—the battle of Bentonville had been fought in 1865—but he felt a powerful empathy with him nonetheless. When he read the page it was as though he was sitt
ing beside the man as he sat in his tent before that calamitous battle, listening to the rain beating on the canvas, and the forlorn songs of the infantrymen as they huddled about their smoky fires, knowing that the following day a vastly superior force would be upon them.
Earlier in his life, when he’d first become familiar with the journal, and particularly with this letter, Cadmus had made it his business to discover as best he could the circumstances in which it had been written. What he discovered was this: that in March of 1865 the depleted forces of the Rebel States, led by Generals Johnston and Bragg, had been driven across North Carolina, and at a place called Bentonville, exhausted, hungry and despairing, they had dug in to face the might of the North. Sherman had the scent of victory; he knew his opponents would not last much longer. The previous November, he had overseen the burning of Atlanta, and Charleston—brave, besieged Charleston—would very soon fall beneath his assault. There was no hope of victory for the South, and surely every man who made up the forces at Bentonville knew it.
The battle would last three days; and by the standards of that war there was not a great loss of life. A thousand and some soldiers of the Union perished, two thousand and some Confederates. But such numbers mean nothing to a soldier in battle, for he need only die one death.
Cadmus had often thought about going to visit the battleground, which had been left, he’d been told, relatively untouched by time. The Harper house, a modest domicile that stood close by the field, and had been turned into a makeshift surgery during the conflict, still stood; the trenches where the Confederate soldiers had waited for the army of the North could still be lain in. With a little research he could probably have discovered where the officers’ tents had been pitched; and sat himself down close to the place where the letter he held in his hand had been penned.
Why had he never gone? Had he simply been afraid that the threads binding his destiny to that of the melancholy Captain Charles Holt would have been strengthened by such a visit? If so, then he’d denied himself in vain: those threads were getting stronger by the moment. He could feel them wrapped around him now—tightening, tightening—as if to draw his fate and that of the captain into some final embrace. He might not have been so troubled had it only been his life which was affected, but of course that wasn’t the case. Loretta’s damned astrologer knew more than he realized, with his insinuations of Geary family secrets and predictions of apocalypse. The intervention of almost a hundred and forty years could not provide asylum from what was in the wind; its message carried like a contagion from that distant battlefield.