“Did Renee know this about Calvin when they married?” I ventured. “I think Renee suggested that Calvin trade Kylie and Armand for his own safety,” she said with surprising calm. “She would never have seen it as a betrayal of principle, you see, but as an organizational necessity. I think that now; at the time, I only saw that she was twenty and I was fortyfive, and I made one last effort to bind Calvin to me. I told him about-Olin and MacKenzie. I left a note in his club on my way to the train station.
“I went up to New York City so that I could be alone for a time, away from Mother’s eyes. And also so I wouldn’t have to face MacKenzie. He was a good man, MacKenzie, and I knew I had done a terrible thing in betraying him to Calvin.” Her mouth worked.
“The committee halted their investigation into Calvin that afternoon, while I was sleeping in my suite at the Plaza. I assumed Calvin and Olin came to a `gentleman’s agreement.”’ She gave the phrase a savage inflection.
“Olin would cease and desist, Armand would go to prison, Kylie would lose her job and Calvin would keep Olin’s affair with MacKenzie to himself-that would have ruined Olin in the fifties, you see. I made all of these assumptions because MacKenzie returned to Larchmont and hanged himself. Neither of us knew that Darraugh was sent home unexpectedly from Exeter.”
She looked at me bleakly. “Of course-Renee knew everything. About me and Calvin, about Olin and MacKenzie. And she flaunted her knowledge to me, in those subtle ways one can in a closed community. I was never more thankful for anything than when she and Calvin bought that apartment in town.”
I went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of water. “Ma’am, I didn’t mean for you to tell me so much, or to have it be so upsetting for you. But you see, I think Olin told this story to Marcus Whitby. And I think Marc went to Renee for her version. Marc was working on a long project on Kylie Ballantine, and he was a careful journalist; he wouldn’t print such a story without hearing the Bayards’ side. Renee killed him, in an efficient way. She gave him bourbon dosed with phenobarbital, and when he fell into a coma, she drove here to Anodyne Park, where she borrowed a golf cart, and drove him to your old pond. Now-I’m afraid she’ll kill the Egyptian boy if she gets to him before I do.”
Geraldine drank the water. “And you think I can stop her? I showed no capacity for that when I was younger and more vital.”
“I’m wondering if Catherine ran away to some place that was important to her and her grandfather. I desperately need to know-it may be too late already now-but-was there some private special place that you and Calvin cherished?”
Her mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “Many special places, all by necessity private. But-I suppose-his family used to own a hunting lodge near Eagle River, up in northern Wisconsin. When the North Woods became a national forest in the thirties, the family had to give up their land, but Calvin’s father worked out an agreement where the family could keep
the lodge for private use for twentyfive years. The agreement must have expired about the time Calvin married Renee.
“The lodge is where we held the committee benefit that caused so much questioning in Congress. And it’s where Calvin and I used to go sometimes in the fall. Besides the great lodge, which would sleep thirty people, there was a cottage in the woods behind it. We were happy there, in a place where we could-be intimate without wondering who was outside the bedroom door. I think Calvin took the girl up there when she was younger.,,
It was a long shot, but it was my only shot. I got to my feet and braced myself for the long drive north.
CHAPTER 51
In Portage, fifty miles north of Madison, the rain changed to snow. I pulled over for gas and hamburgers. Geraldine woke, used the gas station toilet without comment, although it hadn’t seen soap for a few decades, and ate one of the cardboard burgers.
“I drove up here through the snow with Calvin one December,” she said. “I told Mother I was going to St. Augustine to ride; I often did that in the winter, to get away from New Solway. Even in daylight it was a difficult passage. It was still a two-lane road then, with stop signs every so often. Of course the war was on, with gas rationing and rubber rationing; only the wealthy, like Calvin and me, could afford to be driving such distances. We didn’t pass many other vehicles.”
I wondered if she would remember the route to the lodge, but I would worry about that when we got to Eagle River: right now, keeping the car on the road was taking all my energy. That, and staying awake.
“I dredged the pond out at Larchmont on Friday” I said. “I found a ring-I forgot to tell you when I saw you on Sunday. Something that looked like a beehive of diamonds with ruby and emerald chips along the base.”
She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “So it was in the pond all those years. It belonged to Mother. She actually fired one of the maids
for stealing it, although I always thought Darraugh must have taken it. It was a terribly ugly thing, that ring, but Mother prized it because her father gave it to her at her coming-out party. It disappeared soon after MacKenzie died, when Mother was in her element, holding the press at bay, publicly flaunting herself in black crepe, privately gloating. Darraugh turned on her in an almost violent way.
“He turned on me, too, but I felt I had earned it and did nothing to try to deflect his rage. Everything was gray for me then, losing Calvin, losing MacKenzie, losing Darraugh, all in one short spring. My daughter, Laura, was away at Vassar. And anyway, she shared my mother’s attitude towardme, toward her father. She held herself disapprovingly aloof from all of us and our turmoil. She’s a wonderful matron now; her grandmother would be proud of her for upholding the ancien regime.”
“Does Darraugh know that your husband wasn’t his father?” I asked.
“I never told him. Mother hinted at it, but she couldn’t have known with certainty Although of course she made burrowing into my private life her major business, bribing servants, searching my room.” Geraldine’s flutey voice wavered. I turned my eyes briefly from the slippery road to look at her: she was staring straight ahead, her hands knotted in her lap.
“Darraugh and Mother fought in an interminable, intolerable way after MacKenzie’s death. She called MacKenzie ugly names, cruel names, to my son and suggested MacKenzie could never have fathered a child. Darraugh came to me. I said of course he was MacKenzie’s son. But Darraugh didn’t believe me, and he felt Mother’s words bitterly, felt them as my betrayal of himself and of MacKenzie. He ran away from home. We hired detectives such as yourself, but couldn’t find him.
“I finally fled to France, where I stayed for almost a year, until I learned that Darraugh had suddenly reappeared at Exeter. One of the masters inspired his confidence, it seemed. It was still years before he talked to me again, but when he married, his wife acted as a peacemaker. Elise was a lovely girl. She softened all o? us-well, she softened Darraugh and me. Certainly not Mother, who kept trying to make us despise her for having been a typist when Darraugh met her. When we lost Elise, to leukemia, Darraugh froze over again.”
I pulled over to the side of the road to clean off the headlights and the buildup of snow at the bottom of the windshield. When I got back into the car, Geraldine asked if I’d found anything else in the pond.
“Bits of Crown Derby. One of Kylie Ballantine’s masks.”
“That was my doing,” she said. “How strange it is to talk about all of this so calmly, when I held it fast inside me for five decades. We all bought masks to support Kylie after she lost her teaching position at the University of Chicago. And then, after Calvin brought Renee home, Renee made it clear to me that I had only been one of Calvin’s loves. Only one of the women who traveled this road to Eagle River with him all those years ago. I threw the mask in the pond in the middle of a night much like this one.”