Dr. Frank Lipscombe warned Reynolds McGruder to keep a careful eye on his surviving son, lest he wrongly begin to feel that his brother had been killed in his stead, and then react hysterically to the unfortunate tragedy. This was not an uncommon wartime experience, Lipscombe explained to McGruder, witness the remarkable insights of the play Home of the Brave, where the hero suffered hysterical paralysis because of guilt feelings exacerbated on the battlefield. “The guilt in the case of your son Danny,” he said, “may be caused by an erroneous belief that only a stroke of luck sent him to college and David to Vietnam. In which case, he could easily...”
“Yes, I understand,” McGruder said. Tears were forming in his eyes. He turned away and went to sit quietly on the deck outside.
“How’s your daughter doing?” Lipscombe asked.
“Fine,” Jamie said. He never knew what to say when they asked.
“Where is she now? Home for the summer?”
“No,” Jamie said, and hesitated. “She’s in India.”
“India?”
“Yes.”
“Ah,” Lipscombe said.
Jamie waited. He knew what the next question would be. It had been asked of him a dozen times or more since that last letter from Lissie. It had been asked at Rutledge parties, and outside the Rutledge post office, and in the Rutledge hardware store, and once during a shoot in New York, and once in the steam room at the New York Athletic Club — the same question each and every time. Lipscombe asked the question now.
“Where in India?”
And Jamie, as always, hesitated. He didn’t know where in India. He had not heard from his daughter since the fourteenth of August.
“I don’t know where,” he said at last.
Lipscombe’s eyebrows went up onto his forehead. “Haven’t you heard from her?” he said.
“Not recently,” Jamie said.
“Well, I’m sure she’s all right,” Lipscombe said.
They all said that. You told them you didn’t know where your daughter was, and they all said, “Well, I’m sure she’s all right.”
Jamie was not at all sure she was all right.
He could not later remember exactly when he began to believe she was dead. It was certainly sometime in September. With a son, he thought, they draft him and the authorities know where he is at all times and if he gets killed in a rice paddy they send you a telegram like the one Reynolds got, or the one Matthew Bridges got, they send you a telegram. But with a daughter, there’s no one to keep track of where she’s been or where she’s going, no one but herself, and if she doesn’t choose to let you in on the secret, why then you are in the dark, man, you are sitting here in the autumn dark in the town of Rutledge, Connecticut, drinking strong whiskey neat on a cold September afternoon, the trees rattling, the wind wanting to know where the summer had gone? Where’d my golden girl of summer go, he wondered, where’s my darling Lissie?
He would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, and lie staring at the ceiling, wondering whether Connie was awake beside him, wondering (if she was asleep instead) whether he should awaken her to discuss the only thing that seemed to be on his mind these days, the possibility that his daughter was dead. He would lie there, certain now that Connie was awake beside him and possibly thinking the exact same thoughts, but he would say nothing to her, would lie there silently instead in the stillness of the night, and then become suddenly angry, trembling with an overriding fury that made him want to get up and knock the radio-clock off the dresser, or pick up the chair with his clothes draped over it, hurl it through the window, push his fist through plaster and lath, kick things, smash things — how could she be so fucking inconsiderate, didn’t she know they were back here waiting helplessly for some word from her, hoping against hope that she wasn’t—
Dead, he thought.
And the anger would vanish, and he would lie in the darkness as the grief enveloped him, the sadness touching his eyes, sitting behind his eyes but refusing him the mercy of tears, wrapping him as completely as a shroud, his face, his throat, suffocating him, constricting his chest, making it impossible for him to breathe in the dark, his daughter dead in the dark, she had abandoned his life and forfeited her own, in the dark, dead someplace in India. He mourned for her, but the tears would not come. His eyes burned with tears scalding from within and behind, but they would not come. He could not cry for the daughter he knew was dead but prayed was not.
Once, in the middle of the night at the beginning of October, he dared to cross the line he and Connie tacitly respected, dared to open the casket of horrors stored in the darkest corner of his dread, dared to whisper in the dark, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Connie sighed.
And said nothing.
Larry Kreuger called the very next day.
It was Lester Blair who found her.
He had come down from the house up on the ridge to walk his two Irish terriers through the woods near the reservoir. She was lying in the underbrush alongside the old logging road that paralleled the Blair driveway. The dogs stopped dead in their tracks. He thought at first they’d smelled a raccoon, or maybe a snake; there were lots of copperheads here near the water. One of the dogs began whimpering. Lester said, “Shh, boy,” and squinted through the foliage, and saw her lying on her side with the back of her head blown away.
She was wearing what looked to be a party dress, pink and silky and spattered with blood, the hem pulled back over pantyhose she must have torn coming through the woods, ladders up the sleek shiny sides of both legs, blood on the legs, too, blood all over the ground around her, shining on the fallen russet leaves. One of her high-heeled shoes had dropped from her foot. The foot looked particularly vulnerable without the shoe on it. More than anything else, that foot without a shoe on it seemed to sum up for Lester the utter vulnerability of the young girl who lay on the ground on the shiny red leaves. The weight of a twenty-gauge shotgun crushed the wet red leaves.
The call to Jamie came at 10:00 A.M. that Sunday morning, the eleventh day of October. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Connie, sipping at his coffee as he leafed through the Times Magazine section, studying the photographs, commenting every now and again on the particular ineptitude of this or that photographer; he had begun to notice about himself that he rarely commented on skill anymore, but only on the lack of it. When the phone rang, he took another sip of coffee before answering.
“Hello?” he said.
“Jamie, it’s Larry Kreuger. I’m sorry to be breaking in on your Sunday this way.”
His voice sounded odd. Jamie knew at once that something was wrong. He had no idea yet of the magnitude of the wrongness.
“What is it?” he asked at once.
“I wonder can you come on over.” Larry’s voice, southern, gentle, polite, was still underscored with an ominous note.