“Tell me,” she said. “What are your thoughts right now?”
“Oh, nothing, really. I was thinking about the redwoods and the way they always make me feel. They’re so out of proportion to everything around them. It’s as if they’re always saying, ‘We were here before your kind ever visited these shores, and we will be here when you and your houses are no more.’ ”
There was something unmistakably tragic in her eyes as she smiled at him. “That’s so true. How my uncle Felix loved them,” she said. “They’re protected, you know, those trees. They can’t be logged. Uncle Felix saw to that.”
“Thank heavens,” he whispered. “I shudder when I see all those old photographs of the loggers up here in the old days, chopping down redwoods that had been alive for a thousand years. Think of it, a thousand years.”
“That’s precisely what Uncle Felix said once, damn near word for word.”
“He wouldn’t want to see this house torn down, would he?” He was immediately ashamed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Oh, but you’re absolutely right. He wouldn’t have wanted it, no, never. He loved this house. He was in the process of restoring it when he disappeared.”
She looked off again, wistfully, longingly.
“And we’ll never know, I don’t suppose,” she said, sighing.
“What is that, Marchent?”
“Oh, you know, how my great-uncle actually disappeared.” She made a soft derisive sound. “We are all such superstitious creatures, really. Disappeared! Well, I suppose he is as dead in real life as he is legally. But it seems I’m giving up on him now in selling the old place, that I’m saying, ‘Well, we will never know and he will never come through that door there again.’ ”
“I understand,” he whispered. The fact was he knew absolutely nothing about death. His mother and father and brother and girlfriend told him that in one way or another just about every day. His mother lived and breathed the Trauma Center at San Francisco General. His girlfriend knew absolutely the worst side of human nature from the cases she handled in the D.A.’s office every day. As for his father, he saw death in the falling leaves.
Reuben had written six articles and covered two murders in his time at the San Francisco Observer. And both the women in his life had praised his writing to the skies, and lectured him at length on what he failed to grasp.
Something his father said came back to him. “You’re innocent, Reuben, yes, but life will teach you what you need to know soon enough.” Phil was always making rather unusual pronouncements. He said at dinner last night, “Not a day goes by, when I don’t ask a cosmic question. Does life have meaning? Or is this all smoke and mirrors? Are we all doomed?”
“You know, Sunshine Boy, I know why nothing really penetrates with you,” Celeste had said later. “Your mother talks in detail about her surgeries over shrimp cocktail, and your father will only talk about what absolutely does not matter at all. I’ll take your easy brand of optimism any day. The fact is, you make me feel good.”
Had that made him feel good? No. Not at all. But the strange thing about Celeste was that she was far more affectionate and kindly than her words ever indicated. She was a killer of an attorney, a five-foot-two firebrand on the job, but with him, she was cuddly and downright sweet. She fussed over his clothes, and always answered her phone. She had lawyer friends on speed dial to answer any questions he encountered in his reporting. But her tongue? Her tongue was a little sharp.
The fact is, Reuben thought suddenly, secretively, there is something dark and tragic about this house that I want to know. The house made him think of cello music, deep, rich, a little rough, and uncompromising The house was talking to him, or maybe it would talk to him if he’d stop listening to the voices of home.
He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Without taking his eyes off the house, he turned it off.
“Oh good gracious, look at you,” said Marchent. “You’re freezing, dear boy. How utterly thoughtless of me. Come, we must get you inside.”
“I’m a San Francisco kid,” he muttered. “I’ve slept all my life on Russian Hill with the window wide open. I should have been prepared.”
He followed her up the stone steps, and through the massive arched front door.
The warmth of the room was immediate and delicious, even though it was a vast space, under a high beamed ceiling, its dark oak floors stretching on forever in a kind of airy gloom.
The blazing fireplace was distant but cavernous, facing them directly from across a dark expanse of rather shapeless old couches and chairs.
He’d smelled the oak logs burning earlier, just a whiff here and there as they’d walked on the hillside, and he’d loved that.
She led him to the velvet couch right beside the hearth. There was a silver coffee service on the large marble coffee table.
“You get warm,” she said. And she stood there herself before the flames warming her hands.
There were huge old brass andirons and a fender, and the bricks on the back of the fireplace were black.
She turned and moved about almost silently on the old worn Oriental carpets, turning on the many scattered lamps.
Slowly the room took on a cheerful glow.
The furniture was immense, but comfortable, with worn but serviceable slipcovers and occasional caramel-colored leather chairs. There were a few hulking bronze sculptures, all of predictable mythological figures, very old-fashioned. And a number of dark landscapes in heavy gilt frames hanging here and there.
The warmth was now relentless. In a few minutes he would be taking off his scarf and his coat.
He looked up at the old dark wood paneling above the fireplace, rectangles neatly trimmed in deeply carved egg-and-dart molding, and at the similar paneling that covered the walls. There were bookcases flanking the fireplace, stuffed with old volumes, leather, cloth, even paperbacks, and far to the right over his shoulder he glimpsed an east-facing room that looked like a vintage paneled library, the kind he’d always dreamed of having for himself. There was a fire in there too.
“It takes my breath away,” he said. He could see his father sitting here, shuffling his poems as he made his endless notes. Yes, he would love this place, no doubt of it. It was the place for cosmic reflections and decisions. And how shocked everybody would be if—.
And why wouldn’t his mother be glad? They loved each other, his mother and father, but they did not get along. Phil tolerated Grace’s doctor friends; and Grace found his few old academic friends an absolute bore. Poetry reading made her furious on general principles. The movies he liked she abhorred. If he spoke his opinion at a dinner party, she changed the subject with the person next to her, or left the room for another bottle of wine, or started to cough.
It wasn’t deliberate, really. His mom wasn’t mean. His mom was full of enthusiasm for the things she loved, and she adored Reuben and he knew this had given him a confidence many people never enjoyed. It was just that she couldn’t stand her husband, and for most of his life Reuben had actually understood.
It was harder to take these days, however, because his mom seemed powerful and timeless, a compulsive worker with a divine vocation; and his father seemed now worn out and obscenely old. Celeste had become his mom’s fast friend (“We are both driven women!”) and sometime lunch companion, but she ignored the “old man,” as she called him. And now and then she even said ominously to Reuben, “Look, do you want to turn out like him?”
Well, how would you like to live here, Dad, Reuben thought. And we’d go walking in the redwoods together, and maybe fix up that old dilapidated guesthouse for the poet friends, but of course there’s room for all of them in the house, why you could have a regular seminar up here with them anytime you wanted, and Mom could come up when she chose.
That would be never, most likely.
Oh, hell, he couldn’t work out the fantasy right now, could he? Marchent was looking sadly into the fire, and he should be asking qu
estions. “Let me get this straight,” Celeste would say, “I work seven days a week and you’re supposed to be a reporter now and you’re going to, what, drive four hours a day to get to work?”
This would be for Celeste the final disappointment, the first being that he didn’t know who he was. She’d gone through law school like a rocket and passed the bar at age twenty-two. He’d quit the English Ph.D. program over the foreign-language requirements, and really didn’t have a life plan at all. Wasn’t it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was? He’d asked that once, in just those words, and she’d laughed. They’d both laughed. “Nice work if you can get it, Sunshine Boy,” she said. “I’m due in court.”
Marchent was tasting the coffee. “Hot enough,” she said.
She filled a china cup with coffee for him and gestured to the silver cream pitcher, and the little pile of sugar cubes in the silver dish. All of it so pretty, so nice. And Celeste would think, How dreary, and his mother might not notice at all. Grace had an aversion to all matters domestic, except festive cooking. Celeste said kitchens were for storing Diet Coke. His father would like it—his father had a general fund of knowledge about all manner of things, including silver and china, the history of the fork, holiday customs the world over, the evolution of fashion, cuckoo clocks, whales, wines, and architectural styles. His private nickname for himself was “Miniver Cheevy.”
But the point was Reuben liked all this. Reuben loved it. Reuben was Reuben, and Reuben liked the great stone mantelpiece with its scroll supports very much as well.
“So what are you writing in your poetic head just now?” Marchent asked.
“Hmmm. The ceiling beams, they’re enormous, and just possibly the longest ceiling beams I’ve ever seen. The carpets are Persian, all floral designs, except for the little prayer rug there. And there are no evil spirits under this roof.”
“ ‘No bad vibrations’ is what you mean,” she said. “And I agree with you. But I’m sure you realize that I would never be able to stop grieving for Uncle Felix if I stayed on. He was a titan of a man. I’ll tell you, it’s all come back to me, Felix and his disappearing, I mean, I hadn’t brooded over it all for some time. I was eighteen when he walked out that door for the Middle East.”
“Why the Middle East?” he asked. “Where was he headed?”
“An archaeological dig, that was often the reason for his trips. That last time it was in Iraq, something about a new city, as old as Mari or Uruk. I could never get any corroboration that sounded right. Anyway, he was unusually excited about where he was going, I remember that. He’d been talking on the phone long-distance to his friends all over the world. I didn’t think much of it. He was always going, and always coming back. If it wasn’t a dig, then he was off to some foreign library to look at a fragment of manuscript that had just been unearthed in some unpublished collection by one of his many students. He paid them by the dozens. They were always sending information. He lived in his own fully detached and lively world.”
“He must have left papers behind,” said Reuben, “a man engaged in all that.”
“Papers! Reuben, you have no idea. There are rooms upstairs that are filled with nothing but papers, manuscripts, binders, crumbling books. There is so much to be gone through, so many decisions to be made. But if the house sells tomorrow, I’m ready to ship it all to climate-controlled storage and work with it from there.”
“Was he searching for something, something in particular?”
“Well, if he was, he never said. One time he did say, ‘This world needs witnesses. Too much is lost.’ But I think it was a general complaint. He financed digs, I know that. And often met with archaeology students and history students who didn’t work for him. I recall them coming and going here. He would give out his own little private grants.”
“What a great thing,” Reuben said, “to live like that.”
“Well, he had the money, as I well know now. There was never any doubt he was rich, but I didn’t know how rich until everything came to me. Come, shall we have a look around?”
How he loved the library.
But it was one of those showplace rooms in which no one ever wrote a letter or read a book. Marchent confessed as much. The old French desk was exquisitely polished and its brass ormolu as bright as gold. It had a clean green blotter, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with the inevitable classics in leather binding that would have made them awkward to carry in a knapsack or read on a plane.
There was the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes, an old Encyclopaedia Britannica, massive art tomes, atlases, and thick old volumes whose gilded titles had been worn away.
An awe-inspiring room. He saw his father at the desk watching as the light faded from the leaded windows, or sitting in the velvet-padded window seat with a book. The eastern windows of the house along that wall must have been thirty feet wide.
Too dark now to see the trees. In the morning, he’d come into this room early. And if he bought this house, he’d give this room to Phil. In fact, he could bait his father with a description of all this. He noted the oak parquet with its huge intricate inlaid squares, and the ancient railroad clock on the wall.
Red velvet draperies hung from brass rods, and a great large photograph hung over the mantel, of a group of six men, all in safari khaki, gathered together against a backdrop of banana and tropical trees.
It had to have been taken with sheet film. The detail was superb. Only now in the digital age could you blow up a photo to that size without degrading it hopelessly. But this had never been retouched. Even the banana leaves looked engraved. You could see the finest wrinkles in the men’s jackets, and the dust on their boots.
Two of the men had rifles, and several stood quite casually and free with nothing in their hands at all.
“I had that made,” Marchent said. “Quite expensive. I didn’t want a painting, only an accurate enlargement. It’s four by six feet. You see the figure in the middle? That’s Uncle Felix. That is the only really current picture I had of him before he disappeared.”
Reuben drew closer to look at it.
The names of the men were inscribed in black ink across the mat border just inside the frame. He could barely read them.
Marchent turned on the chandelier for him and now he could see plainly the figure of Felix, the dark-skinned and dark-haired man who stood near the middle of the group, a very agreeable-looking figure really, with a fine tall physique, and the same lean graceful hands he admired so in Marchent, and even something of the same very gentle smile. A likable man surely, an approachable man, with a near-childlike expression: curious, enthusiastic perhaps. He looked to be anywhere from twenty to about thirty-five.
The other men were undeniably interesting, all with rather abstracted and serious expressions, and one in particular stood out, to the far left. He was tall like the others and he wore his dark hair shoulder length. If it hadn’t been for the safari jacket and the khaki pants, he might have looked like an Old West buffalo hunter with that long hair. There was positive radiance to his face—rather like one of those dreamy figures in a Rembrandt painting who seems touched at a particular mystical moment by a key light from God.
“Oh, yes, him,” said Marchent rather dramatically. “Isn’t he something? Well, that was Felix’s closest friend and mentor. Margon Sperver. But Uncle Felix always called him just Margon and sometimes Margon the Godless, though why in the world he called him that I don’t know. It always made Margon laugh. Margon was the teacher, said Felix. If Uncle Felix couldn’t answer a question, he’d say, ‘Well, maybe the teacher knows,’ and off he would go to find Margon the Godless by phone wherever he was in the world. There are thousands of photographs of these gentlemen in the rooms upstairs—Sergei, Margon, Frank Vandover—all of them. They were his closest associates.”
“And yo
u couldn’t reach any of them after he disappeared?”
“Not a single one. But understand. We didn’t start trying for about a year. We expected to hear from him any day. His trips could be very short, but then he’d vanish, you know, just drop off the charts. He’d go off into Ethiopia or India beyond anyone’s reach. One time he called from an island in the South Pacific after a full year and a half. My father sent a plane to get him. And no, I never found a single one of them, including Margon the Teacher, and that was the saddest part of all.”
She sighed. She seemed very tired now. In a small voice, she added: “At first my father didn’t try very hard. He came into a lot of money right after Felix disappeared. He was happy for the first time. I don’t think he wanted to be reminded about Felix. ‘Felix, always Felix,’ he would say whenever I asked questions. He and my mother wanted to enjoy the new legacy—something from an aunt, I believe.” This was costing her, this painful confession.
He reached out slowly, giving her full warning, and then put his arm around her and kissed her cheek just the polite way that she had kissed him earlier that afternoon.
She turned and melted against him for a moment, kissing him on the lips quickly and then said again that he was the most charming boy.
“It’s a heartbreaking story,” he said.
“You are such a strange boy, so young yet so old at the same time.”
“I hope so,” he said.
“And there’s that smile. Why do you hide that smile?”
“Do I?” he asked. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, you’re right, you certainly are. It’s a heartbreaking story.” She looked again at the photograph. “That’s Sergei,” she said, pointing to a tall blond-haired man, a man with pale eyes who seemed to be dreaming or lost in his thoughts. “I suppose I knew him the best. I didn’t really know the others that well at all. At first, I thought sure I’d find Margon. But the numbers I found were for hotels in Asia and the Middle East. And they knew him, of course, but they had no idea where he was. I called every hotel in Cairo and Alexandria looking for Margon. As I recall, we tried every place in Damascus too. They’d spent a lot of time in Damascus, Margon and Uncle Felix. Something to do with an ancient monastery, newly unearthed manuscripts. In fact, all those finds are still upstairs. I know where they are.”