"I don't resent anything, David."
"Come off it, kid brother. We have to talk about it sometime. Alma and I both feel that way."
One of my problems was that I didn't know to what extent David's assumptions were correct. It was true that I resented both David and Alma: but was it merely resentment that made me recoil from the thought of them marrying?
A month or so after that, many seesawing conversations later, David called to say that I was "going to have a break from being hounded by your brother. I've got a little business in Amsterdam, so I'm flying there tomorrow for five days. Alma hasn't seen Amsterdam since she was a child, and she'll be coming with me. I'll send you a postcard. But do me a favor and really think about our situation, will you?"
"I'll do my best," I said. "But you care too much about what I think."
"What you think is important to me."
"All right," I said. "Be careful."
Now what did I mean by that?
At times I thought that both David and myself had underestimated her calculation. Suppose, I thought, that Alma had engineered her meeting with David. Suppose that she had deliberately sought him out. When I thought about this, Gregory Benton and the stories of Tasker Martin seemed more sinister-as if they, like Alma, were stalking David.
Four days later I got a call from New York telling me that David was dead. It was one of David's partners, Bruce Putnam; the Dutch police had wired the office. "Do you want to go out there, Mr. Wanderley?" Putnam asked. "We'd like to leave it to you to take it from here. Just keep us informed, will you? Your brother was greatly liked and respected here. None of us can figure out what happened. It sounds like he fell out of a window."
"Have you heard from his fiancée?"
"Oh, did he have a fiancée? Imagine that-he never let on. Was she with him?"
"Of course she was," I said. "She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I'll get on the first plane going."
There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David's office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more-no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.
I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David's Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.
7
I arranged for the cremation and, two days later, stood in a cold crematorium while David's coffin slid along rails toward a fringed green curtain.
Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in PMLA. I began to sketch out The Nightwatcher, having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon's apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.
And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. "You sleep too much, kid," he said. "Why not let me give you a cup?" And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red-haired girl I knew was there, but-again-David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about Portrait of a Lady.
But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of Who's Who for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.
Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry-I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.
MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children-Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; SchlegeL Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR, 1941-1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; "Dans Le Vigne," Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.
This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me-and David, presumably-had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of "Rachel Varney," a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I'd tried to write.
8
I've spent nearly three weeks writing all this out, and all I've done is remember-I'm no closer to understanding it than I was before.
But I've come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I'm no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I'll tell them what I've written out here. This account of my history with Alma-not The Nightwatcher-is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I've given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I'm prepared to change my mind on an important question-right now, maybe the important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey's funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet-was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.
Various odd things have been happening in Milburn. Apparently a group of farm animals, cows and horses, were killed by some kind of beast-I heard a man in the drugstore say that creatures from a flying saucer killed them! And far more seriously, a man either died or was killed. His body was found down near a disused railway siding. He was an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson. Lewis Benedikt in particular seemed to take this death hard, though it appears to have been accidental. In fact, something very peculiar seems to be happening to Lewis: he's become absentminded and fretful, almost as if he were blaming himself for Robinson's death.