Anthony Hyde
The Red Fox
To Kathy with my love
We have here in America an all too obvious and objectionable prejudice against Russia. And this, you will agree, is born of fear. In Russia, something strange and foreboding has occurred, it threatens to undo our present civilization and instinctively we fear change? There are those among us who whisper that this change will mean darkness and chaos, there are those who claim it is but a golden light which, starting from a little flame, shall circle the earth and make it glow with happiness. All that is not for me to say. I am but a messenger who lays his notes before you.
PART ONE
MAY BRIGHTMAN
The Russian Revolution, when it comes, will be all the more terrible because it will be proclaimed in the name of religion. Russian policy has melted the Church into the State and confounded heaven and earth: a man who sees a god in his master scarcely hopes for paradise, except through the favours of the Emperor.
1
I was to learn that all the real secrets are buried and that only ghosts speak the truth. So it was fitting: even for me, all this began in a graveyard, among mysteries, memories, and lies.
That year, the twenty-eighth of October was cold and threatened rain, and as I walked away from the little frame church with Father Delaney, our breath misted in front of us. It was autumn; but autumn already cringed before winter. The three tall oaks that screened off the graveyard were stripped bare as old bones and the summer's grass had died down between the headstones, falling into the brown, tangled surf of a fossilized sea. We walked slowly, in silence. I came here only one day a year, but it was as if I'd never been away. Every step brought a rush of memory: the flick-flick of the old priest's heavy trousers as he walked beside me; the smell of wet leaves under our feet; a rusted iron cross glimpsed in the undergrowth: Jennifer, age three weeks, 1917. Year after year, none of this changed, and when we finally stopped before my father's stone, it could have been five years ago, or ten, or fifteen. All the old emotions welled up the shock, the grief, the fundamental disbelief but they were now so expected, so customary, that even their melancholy was comforting. Gently, I looked down at the slab of polished red granite, and the old priest murmured a prayer under his breath, saying the words in Latin as he knew my mother always liked. I bent forward. Half kneeling, I placed the usual bouquet of cornflowers against the smooth stone, then drew myself up and raised my eyes. My father's grave was right on the crest of the hill; from where I was standing, you could see for miles across a spur of the Tuscarora Mountains, northwest of Harris-burg, Pennsylvania. Low, gray clouds trailed tendrils of showers over the opposite ridge and now a few drops touched my face. The wind, suddenly gusting, bit at my cheek. I turned my head to one side.
Father Delaney ducked his head too. He must have been cold; he was wearing only his priest's black suit with a tartan scarf looped round his neck, as if wishing to cover his collar on this dubious ground. I had always liked him. He was in his sixties or early seventies: heavily built but stooped, with the sad, drooping face of an Irishman and the thick hands of a miner, which his father had been. After a moment, the decent interval, he said, "I'm glad you came, Robert. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure you would."
I looked at him, a little surprised. "Why is that, Father?"
"Oh, I always understood why your mother came, but I was never sure about you. What you thought about it. What your feelings were."
My mother had died the previous winter; for the first time I was making the annual trek by myself. Every year, for so many years, she had come out of love, devotion, and loyalty?and the desire, above everything else, to disprove the doubts I'd seen flicker in so many eyes. A hunting accident. Leastwise, that's what they're calling it? I don't care what anyone says, it's not right, letting them bury him here.? I'd always assumed that the priest had simply transferred these reasons to me, though he was right, they didn't apply. I had my own. I knew, after all, that everything my mother had refused to believe was perfectly true. My father had killed himself. For me, the only mystery was why.
Finally I said, "She loved him very deeply, Father. It's a shame we couldn't have buried her here."
"I'll miss her. Every fall, I looked forward to her visit." I glanced away, back toward the headstone. As a boy, it had frightened me, as though it was the single jaw of some great, terrible trap. Later it had seemed merely frustrating, a door that was locked, bolted, and barred no matter how hard I knocked, it never swung open. Now it was only a monument, but it occurred to me that its letters, so deeply carved in the granite, were gradually growing obscure, turning into a kind of hieroglyphics. My own mother was gone; now I was the only one left to decipher them.
MITCHELL SVEN THORNE
FEB 17 1902? OCT 28 1956
London Paris Capetown Mexico Rome
Mitchell: never Mitch. Sven: after a great-grandfather, from Stockholm. Thorne: originally it had been Torne, the name of a river that runs down the border between Sweden and Finland. Soon enough, no one would know even these elementary facts. As though to confirm this, Father Delaney now asked, "Those cities? I was trying to remember why they were there."
"You remember, Father. He worked for the State Department. Those were the places he served."
"Ah, yes? and you were born in South Africa, weren't you?"
I nodded. I'd only lived there a year, though the fact had dogged me for the rest of my life: it's an inconvenient birth place for a journalist to have in his passport.
Father Delaney shifted his weight on his feet. "You were fourteen, weren't you, when your father died?"
"Yes. Almost fifteen."
His lips compressed and he shook his head. "That was too young, Robert. I still remember how you looked at the funeral, and then those first years when you came with your mother. You were always so stiff and silent. Sometimes I thought you must be terribly angry, and then I wondered if you weren't afraid, like someone who has a secret they're too frightened to tell."
I looked at him, startled. Did he know? Had he guessed that I knew for certain what everyone else only suspected? I turned away quickly, staring out at the valley. The rain had moved closer, wrapping itself around the hills and obscuring the landscape beyond. Below us, a hawk was quartering over a field. I watched him for a moment, but all at once the familiar shape of this day jarred by the old priest's hints I found myself looking straight into the past. Sunday, October 28, 1956. A cabin, not ten miles from where I stood now. My bedroom, cold and bare, the mattress stripped of its sheets. Myself, stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Beside me, strangely miniaturized voices emerge from the earphone of my transistor radio. I'm listening to the "Post-Game Show." The Giants have beaten the Eagles 20-3. Alex Webster gained so many yards; Frank Gifford caught so many passes? The voices drone on. I cease listening. This is the weekend when we're closing the cabin for the season and my mother has been moving around in the other room, cleaning, but now the screen door snaps shut as she steps outside. A moment later, I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and sit up, an action which brings my eyes level with the window. It is now that I see my father. He is hurrying away from the cabin for one instant, I can believe he's walking up to the car but just as he enters the woods, I see the gun, his shotgun, the Remington Wingmaster 870 pump. And I know. In that instant, the tension I've felt both in him and in my mother all the previous week suddenly crystallizes. I know. My heart pounds. No one, under any circumstances, should take a gun into the woods without warning everyone else about what he's doing. It's his golden rule; he'd never break it himself?