Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to be wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.
The little girl drew her blanket above her chin. “It wakes me up when they fight.”
“When who fight, Lily?”
“Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered.”
Caroline didn’t want to believe it. Lily must be hearing other voices, perhaps from the street.
But Lily’s room had only a postage stamp of a window, and it looked out on the back alley, not the busy market street. Lily’s room was in fact a reconstructed closet off the rear hall, a closet Jered had converted into a tiny but comfortable bedchamber for his niece. Enough space for a girl, her bear, her book, and for her mother to sit a while and read.
But the closet shared a wall with Jered and Alice’s bedroom, and these walls weren’t especially thick. Did Jered and Alice argue, late at night, when they thought no one could hear? They seemed happy enough to Caroline… a little aloof, perhaps, moving in separate spheres the way older couples often do, but fundamentally content. They couldn’t have argued often before or Lily would have complained or at least showed symptoms.
The arguments must have started after Colin Watson arrived.
Caroline told Lily to ignore the sounds. Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered weren’t really angry, they were only having disagreements. They really loved each other very much. Lily seemed to accept this, nodded and closed her eyes. Her demeanor improved a little over the next few days, though she was still shy of her uncle. Caroline put the matter out of her mind and didn’t think of it again until the night she fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Dorothy and woke, well after midnight, cramped and uncomfortable, next to Lily.
Jered had been out. It was the sound of the door that woke her. Lieutenant Watson had been with him; Jered said a few inaudible words before the Lieutenant retired to his cellar. Then came Jered’s heavy tread in the corridor, and Caroline, afraid for no reason she could define, pulled Lily’s door closed.
She felt a little absurd, and more than a little claustrophobic sitting cross-legged in this lightless chamber in her nightgown. She listened to the unbroken rhythm of her daughter’s breath, gentle as a sigh. Jered rumbled down the hallway on his way to bed, trailing a steam-engine reek of tobacco and beer.
Now she heard Alice’s low voice greet him, almost as deep as a man’s, and Jered’s, all chest and belly. At first Caroline couldn’t distinguish the words, and she couldn’t hear more than a phrase even when they began to raise their voices. But what she did hear was chilling.
… don’t know how you could get involved… (Alice’s voice.)
… doing my Goddamned duty… (Jered.)
Then Lily woke and needed comforting, and Caroline stroked her golden hair and soothed her.
… you know he might be killed…
… nothing of the kind!
… Caroline’s husband! Lily’s father!
… I don’t rule the world… I didn’t… wouldn’t…
And then quite suddenly the voices lapsed into silence. She imagined Jered and Alice dividing the big bed into territory, marking borders with shoulders and hips, as she and Guilford had sometimes done, after an argument.
They know something, she thought. Something about Guilford, something they don’t want to tell me.
Something bad. Something frightening.
But she was too tired, too shocked to make sense of it. She kissed Lily mechanically and retreated to her own room, to her open window and lazily twining curtains and the odd perfume of the English night. She doubted she could sleep, but slept in spite of herself; she didn’t want to dream but dreamed incoherently of Jered, of Alice, of the sad-eyed young Lieutenant.
Chapter Ten
The summer of 1920 was a chill one, at least in Washington, for which people blamed the Russian volcanoes, the fiery line of geologic disturbance which marked the eastern border of the Miracle and which had been erupting sporadically since 1912, at least according to the refugees who left Vladivostok before the Japanese troubles. Blame it on volcanoes, Elias Vale thought, on sunspots, on God, the gods — all one and the same. He was simply glad to step out of the dreary rain, even into the drearier Main Hall of the National Museum, currently under renovation — work which had been postponed in 1915 and each of the four following years, but for which Eugene Randall had finally prodded funds from the national treasury.
Randall turned out to be an administrator who took his work seriously, the worst kind of boor. And a lonely man, compounding the vice. He had insisted on bringing Vale to the museum the way mothers insist on displaying their infants: the admiration is expected and its absence would be considered an insult.
I am not your friend, Vale thought. Don’t humiliate yourself.
“So much of this work was postponed for so long,” Randall was saying. “But at last we’re making headway. The problem is not what we lack but what we have — the sheer volume of it — like packing a trunk that’s a size too small. Whale skeletons to the South Hall, second story, west wing, and that means marine invertebrates to the North Hall, which means the picture gallery has to be enlarged, the Main Hall renovated…”
Vale gazed blankly at the scaffolding, the tarpaulins protecting the marbled floor. Today was Sunday. The workers had gone home. The museum was gloomy as a funeral parlor, the corpse on view being Man and All His Works. Rain curtained the leaded windows.
“Not that we’re rich.” Randall led him up a flight of stairs. “There was a time when we had almost enough money — the old days — bequests thick as fleas, it seems now. The permanent fund is a shadow of itself, only a few residual legacies, useless railroad bonds, a dribble of interest. Congressional appropriations are all we can count on, and Congress has been chary since the Miracle, though they’re paying for the repairs, steel stacks for the library…”
“The Finch expedition,” Vale added, moved by an impulse that might have been his god’s.
“Aye, and I pray they’re safe, the situation being what it is. We have six sitting congressmen on the Board of Regents, but in matters of state I doubt we rank alongside the English Question or the Japanese Question. Though I may be maligning Mr. Cabot Lodge.”
For weeks Vale’s god had left him more or less alone, and that was pleasant: pleasant to focus on simple mortal concerns, his “indulgences,” as he thought of his drinking and whoring. Now, it seemed, the divine attention had been once again provoked. He felt its presence in his belly. But why here? Why this building? Why Eugene Randall?
As well ask, Why a god? Why me? The real mysteries.
On into the labyrinth, to Randall’s oak-lined office, where he had papers to pick up, a stop between the latest afternoon salon of Mrs. Sanders-Moss and an evening seance, the latter strictly private, like an appointment with an abortionist.
“I know there’s tension with the English on the issue of arming the Partisans. I fervently hope no harm comes to Finch, unlikable as he may be. You know, Elias, there are religious factions who want to keep America out of the New Europe altogether, and they’re not shy about writing to the Appropriations Committee… Ah, here we are.” A manila file extracted from his desk top. “That’s all I need. Now I suppose it’s on to the infinite… no, I can’t joke about it.” Shyly: “This isn’t meant to insult you, Elias, but I do feel the fool.”