“And I’ll tell her, when I think she’s ready for it. In fact, I’m going to bring her here after we’re married. I’m going to show her everything. And you know what, brother o’ mine?”
“What?”
Marietta’s voice dropped to a raspy whisper. “I’m going to find a way to keep her with me. The years aren’t going to take Alice away from me. I won’t let it happen.”
“It’s a natural process, Marietta. And how do you propose to stop it?”
“Papa knew a way. He told me.”
“Was this one of your dressing room conversations?”
“No, this was a lot later. Just before Galilee came home.”
I was fascinated now. Clearly this was no joke. “What did he tell you?”
“That he’d contemplated keeping your mother with him, but Cesaria had forbidden it.”
“Did he tell you how he’d intended to do it?”
“No. But I’m going to find out,” Marietta said nonchalantly. Then, dropping her voice to something less than a whisper: “If I have to break into his tomb and shake it out of him,” she said, “I’ll do it. Whatever it takes, I’m marrying my Alice till the end of the world.”
What do I make of all this? To be truthful, I try my best not to think too hard about all that she said. It unsettles me. Besides, I’ve got tales to tell: Garrison’s in jail and Margie’s in the morgue; Loretta’s plotting an insurrection. I have more than enough to occupy my thoughts without having Marietta’s obsessions to puzzle over.
All that said, I’m certain there’s some truth in what she told me. My father was undoubtedly capable of extraordinary deeds. He was divine, after his own peculiar fashion, and divinity brings capacities and ambitions that don’t trouble the rest of us. So it seems quite plausible that at some point in his relationship with my mother, whom I think he loved, he contemplated a gift of life to her.
But if my sister believes she can get his bones to tell her how that gift might have been given, she’s in for a disappointment. My father is beyond interrogation, even by his own daughter, and however much Marietta may strut and boast, she wouldn’t dare go where his soul has gone.
If you think I’m tempting fate with these assertions, then so be it. I don’t have the will to explain to you where Nicodemus has gone; and I fervently hope—hope more passionately than I could imagine hoping for anything—that I never have cause to try and find that will. Not because I would fail in that pursuit (though I surely would) but because it would mean the unknowable was attempting to make itself known, and the laws by which this world lives would be littered at our feet.
On such a day, I would not want to be sitting writing a book. On such a day I’m not certain I would want to be alive.
VI
i
The day after Rachel’s encounter with Danny was the day of the funeral. Margie had told her lawyers some years before how she wanted to be buried: alongside her brother Sam—who’d died in a motorcycle accident at the age of twenty-two—and her mother and father, in a small churchyard in Wilmington, Pennsylvania. The significance of this wasn’t lost on anybody. It was Margie’s last act of rejection. Whatever choices she’d made in her life, she knew exactly where she wanted to be in death: and it wasn’t entombed with the Gearys.
Rachel got an early morning call from Mitchell suggesting they travel together, but she declined, and drove to Wilmington alone. It was an ill-tempered day, blustery and bleak, and only the most hardy of celebrity-spotters had trekked through the rain to ogle the mourners. The press were present in force, however, and they had a rare assortment of luminaries to report on. Gossip though she was, Margie had never been much of a name-dropper (she was almost as gleeful discussing the intricacies of a favorite waiter’s adulteries as those of a congressman), and it wasn’t until now that Rachel realized just how many famous and influential people Margie had known. Not simply known, but impressed herself so favorably upon that they’d left the comfort of their fancy houses and their congressional offices, their weekend homes by the shore and in the mountains, to pay their respects. Rachel found herself wondering if Margie’s spirit was here, mingling with the mighty. If so, she was probably remarking uncharitably on this one’s facelift and that one’s waistline; but in her heart she’d surely be proud that the life she’d lived—despite its excesses—had earned this show of sorrow and gratitude.
Mitchell had not yet arrived, but Loretta was already sitting on the front row of the pews, staring fixedly at the flower-bedecked casket. Rachel didn’t particularly want to share the woman’s company, but then nor did she want to be seen to be making any statement by sitting apart, so she made her way down the aisle, pausing in front of the casket for a few moments, then went to sit at Loretta’s side.
There were tears on Loretta’s immaculately painted face; in her trembling hands a sodden handkerchief. This was not the calculating woman who’d presided over the family table at the mansion a few evenings before. Her sadness was too unflattering to be faked: her eyes puffy, her nose running. Rachel put her hand over Loretta’ s hand, and gripped it. Loretta sniffed.
“I wondered if you’d come,” she said quietly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Rachel said.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” Loretta said. “This is all such a mess.” She kept staring at the casket. “At least she’s out of it. It’s just us now.” There was a long silence. Then Loretta murmured: “She hated me.”
Rachel was about to mouth some platitude; then thought better of it. Instead she said: “I know.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because of Galilee.”
It was the last name Rachel had expected to hear in these circumstances. Galilee belonged in another world; a warm, enchanted world where the air smelled of the sea. She closed her eyes for a moment and brought that place into her mind’s eye. The deck of The Samarkand at evening: the sleepy ocean rolling against the hull, the creaking ropes calling out the stars, and Galilee encircling her. She longed to be there as she’d longed for nothing in her life. Longed to hear his promises, even knowing he’d break them.
Her thoughts were interrupted by murmurings from the pews behind her. She opened her eyes, in time to follow Loretta’s gaze toward the back of the church. There was a small group of dark-suited mourners there. The first one she recognized was Cecil; then the tallest of them turned to look toward the altar, and she heard Loretta murmur oh Lord, that’s all we need and realized she was looking at Garrison. He’d changed since Rachel had seen him last: his hair was short, his face pinched and pale. He looked almost frail.
The murmurs quickly subsided, and eyes were averted, but a subtle change had passed through the assembly. The man responsible for the death of the woman they’d come to mourn was here, walking down the aisle to pay his respects before her casket. Mitchell accompanied him, his arm lightly holding Garrison’s elbow, as if to guide him.
“When did he get out?” Rachel whispered to Loretta.
“This morning,” she replied. “I told Cecil to keep him away.” She shook her head. “It’s grotesque.”
Garrison was standing in front of Margie’s casket now. He leaned over to his brother, and whispered something. Mitchell stepped back. Then Garrison reached over and put both his hands on the casket. There was nothing theatrical about the gesture; indeed he seemed oblivious to the presence of those around him. He simply stood there with his head bowed, as if attempting to commune with the body. Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Everyone—even those members of the congregation who’d earlier averted their eyes—were now watching the mourning man. How many of them, she wondered, believed his version of events? Probably most. Lord knows it was hard enough for her to believe that Garrison was capable of mourning at the casket of a woman he’d murdered.
As she turned back she found Mitchell staring at her. He looked exhausted. For the first time in the years she’d known him she saw the resemblance to Garrison
: in the fierceness of his stare and the weary shape of his shoulders. In other circumstances she might have said a couple of weeks in the Caribbean would have cured his ills, but she knew better: he was sliding away from himself—or at least from the polished illusion of himself he’d presented to the world; away into the sad, shadowy place where Garrison had skulked all these years.
What had Loretta called them? The idiot and the necrophile? A little excessive perhaps, but it probably wasn’t so very far from the truth. They certainly belonged together, the tainted fruit of a tainted tree.
Mitchell had taken his gaze off her by now, and was gently tugging on his brother’s arm. Garrison looked back at him. Rachel saw Mitchell say come along, and lamblike Garrison went with him. They sat together at the far end of the same row as Rachel and Loretta. Again, Mitchell glanced Rachel’s way. This time she too averted her gaze.
The service was conducted with considerable decorum by a very elderly preacher who during his eulogy told the gathering that he’d baptized Margie in this very church, forty-eight years before. He had followed the life of “this remarkable woman,” as he called her, with the same mixture of astonishment and sadness he was certain they all felt. She had been troubled, he said, and had perhaps not always made the best of choices in her life’s journey, but now she stood on the Golden Floor, where the vicissitudes of her life were lifted from her, and she could go lightly on her way. Rachel had never heard anybody refer to heaven as the Golden Floor before. She liked the phrase immensely, though she suspected that if Margie had been one of the mourners rather than the mourned she would have slipped away at the first mention of paradise, and gone to sit among the gravestones and smoke a cigarette.
With the service over, the casket was carried out to the graveside. This was the part Rachel had been dreading; but by the time the moment of descent came, and she was standing there in the drizzle watching the casket go from view, she’d been anticipating the horror of it for so long the actuality was something of an anticlimax. There were more prayers; flowers thrown down into the grave; then it was over.
ii
The rain came on heavily as she drove back to the city. A few miles short of the bridge she was overtaken by a white Mercedes being driven at suicidal speed, which was pursued through the deluge by two police cars. Another two miles and she saw red lights flashing through the downpour, and flames burning on the highway. The pursued car had plowed into the back of a large truck; and two other vehicles had then struck it, spinning across the slick asphalt. One was burning, its lucky occupants standing in the rain watching the conflagration. The other had turned over and sat in the rain like a tortured tortoise, while the officers attempted to free the family inside. As for whoever had been driving the Mercedes, he or she had presumably been given up for dead, along with any passengers: it had concertinaed against the rear of the truck and was virtually unrecognizable. Needless to say, the entire highway was blocked. She waited for half an hour before the flow was reestablished, during which time she saw a whole melancholy scenario played out before her like a piece of rain-sodden theater. The arrival of firetrucks and ambulances; the freeing of the family (one of whom, a child, was delivered from the wreckage dead); grief and accusations; and finally the prying apart of the truck and the Mercedes, the contents of which were thankfully concealed from her view.
It was only when she was off on her way again that she turned her thoughts to the business of the following day: the search for Danny’s letters. If she was lucky Garrison would go to Mass in the morning, as he sometimes did. He had his liberty to give thanks for. And while he was being a good Catholic boy she’d go up to the apartment in Trump Tower and start her search. If she failed to find anything in the first attempt, she’d either have to wait for the following Sunday, when she could guarantee his absence, or else somehow monitor his whereabouts during the week. It would be hard to spy on the Tower without being noticed. There’d be journalists cruising around for a little while yet; and there had of course been some staff in residence, though she’d heard from somebody that two of them had left after Margie’s murder and the third had been telling all kinds of tales to the gutter-press, so she’d presumably been fired.
In the end she’d just have to trust to luck, and have a good, solid excuse for her presence in the apartment if she was discovered. The fact was she felt perversely exhilarated at the thought of going into the Tower. For too long she’d been a passive object; part of the grand Geary scheme. Even her trip to Kaua’i had been initiated by somebody within the family. By helping Danny—or attempting to do so—she was defying her allotted role; and her only regret was that she’d taken so long to do it. Such were the seductions of luxury.
Now, as she began to see the path before her more clearly, she found herself wondering whether Galilee, the prince of her heart, was also one of those seductions. Was he the ultimate luxury? Dropped in her path to distract her from looking where she was not supposed to look? How she longed to have Margie at the other end of a telephone, to share these ruminations with her. Margie had always been able to go unerringly to the heart of a subject; to strip away all the high-minded stuff and focus on the real meat of a thing. What would she have said about Rachel’s theorizing? That it was irrelevant, probably, to the business of getting through the day. That attempting to understand the big picture was to partake of a peculiarly male delusion: the belief that events could be shaped and dictated, forced to reflect the will of an individual. Margie had never had much time for that kind of thinking. The only things in life that could truly be controlled were the little things: the number of olives in your martini, the height of your heel. And the men who believed otherwise—the potentates and the plutocrats—were setting themselves up for terrible disappointment sooner or later; which fact, of course, gave her no little pleasure.
Perhaps, Rachel thought, these things worked differently on the Golden Floor. Perhaps up there the Grand Design was the subject of daily chitchat, and the spirits of the dead took pleasure in working out the vast patterns of human endeavor. But she doubted it. Certainly she couldn’t imagine Margie having much time for that kind of business. Matters of destiny might be the subject of debate in other quarters, but where Margie held court there would be a happy throng of gossipers, rolling their eyes at the theorists.
The thought made Rachel smile; the first smile of that long, unhappy day. Margie had earned her freedom. Whether her suffering had been self-inflicted (or at least self-perpetuated) the point was surely that she’d endured it without losing sight of the sweet soul she’d been before the Gearys had found her. She’d made the trick look simple, but, as Rachel had found, it was hard to pull off. This world was like a labyrinth; it was easy to get lost in, to become a stranger to yourself. Rachel had been lucky. She’d rediscovered herself back on the island; found the wildling Rachel, the woman of flesh and blood and appetite. She would not lose that woman again. However dark the maze became, however threatening its occupants, she would never again let go of the creature she was; not now that Galilee loved her.
VII
Sunday morning, and the rain was heavier than ever, so heavy at times you couldn’t see more than a block in any direction. If there’d been any photographers outside the Tower they’d taken refuge until their subject came back from Mass; or else they’d followed him there. Margie had given Rachel a key to the apartment when the first difficulties with Mitchell had begun, telling her to use the place whenever she wanted to escape.
“Garrison’s scarcely ever here,” she’d said, “so you needn’t worry about meeting him in his underwear. Which is quite a sight, believe me. He looks like a stick of dough with a paunch.”
Rachel had never liked the Tower, or the apartment. It had always seemed, despite its glitz, a rather depressing place, even on bright days. And on a day like today, with the sky gray, it was murky and melancholy. The fact that the rooms were furnished with antiques, and the halls hung with huge, futile paintings which Garrison had c
ollected as investments in the early eighties, only added to the charmlessness of the place.
She waited in the hallway for a few moments listening for any sound of occupancy. The only noise she heard came from outside; rain beating against the windows; the distant wail of a siren. She was alone. Time to begin.
She started up the stairs, her ascent taking her into still darker territory. There was a grandfather clock at the top of the flight and her heart jumped when she saw it looming there, imagining for a moment it was Garrison, waiting for her.
She paused while the hammering in her heart subsided. I’m afraid of him, she thought. It was the first time she’d admitted the fact to herself: she was afraid of what he might do if he found her trespassing where she had no business going. It was one thing to hear Loretta talk about his perversions, or to see him, weak and pale, standing before Margie’s casket. It was quite another to imagine encountering him here, in the place where he’d slaughtered his own wife. What would she say to him if he did suddenly appear? Did she have a single lie in her head that he’d believe? Probably not. Her only defense against his malice was the fact that she had once been his brother’s bride, and how secure a lien against assault was that? The bond between the brothers was far stronger than any claim she might have. At that moment, standing on the stairs, she believed he would probably kill her if the occasion called for it.
She thought of what Mitchell had said two days before; that remark about how dangerous her life would become if he weren’t there to protect her. It wasn’t an empty threat; it had carried weight. She was forfeitable, just like Margie.
“Get a grip,” she murmured to herself. This was neither the place nor time to contemplate her vulnerability.
She had to do what she’d come here to do and then get out. Daring the pale face of the clock (which had not worked, Margie had once told her, since the last years of the Civil War) she climbed the rest of the stairs to the second floor. Margie’s private sitting room was on this floor; so was her bedroom, and the bathroom where she’d died. Rachel had intended not to go into the bathroom unless she ran out of places to search, but now, marooned on the landing, she knew the proximity of the place would haunt her unless she confronted it. Flipping on the landing light she went to the bedroom door. It was open a few inches. The room was bright: the investigating officers had left all the drapes wide. They’d also left the room in a state of complete disarray; the whole place had clearly been picked over for evidence. This was the only room in the house hung with pictures that reflected Margie’s eclectic taste: a cloyingly sweet Chagall, a small Pissarro depicting a little French village, two Kandinskys. And in bizarre contrast to all this color, two Motherwell elegies, stark black forms against dirty white, which hung like memento mori to either side of her bed.