“I think,” her mother said, “if you’re determined to do this, what you need is to talk to Tim.”
Laura said, “You know where he is?”
“Not really. But we got this from him at Christmas… maybe it’s useful to you?”
Jeanne took the card from the pocket of her quilted housecoat. It was not a Christmas card, just an ordinary postcard, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air, and the white buildings on the hills beyond it like some painter’s dream of a city.
It was the only communication she had received from her son in the past ten years.
Laura accepted the card from her mother. She turned it over and read the message there. Merry Christmas was all it said, but she recognized the handwriting—after all these years—as Tim’s. The message was mysterious; she could not discern either sincerity or irony in it.
But there was a return address there, too, crabbed and small at the top of the card. Someplace in San Francisco.
Laura looked up somberly.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Be careful,” her mother said.
2
That last night in the old house in Polger Valley, Karen stayed up and wrote in her journal.
Rustle of cold wind at the window, scratch of pen on paper.
I think about Daddy, she wrote.
The pen hesitated on the page.
She wrote, I carry him inside me and I have carried him inside me longer than I knew.
He means well, she wrote.
But then she scratched it out.
She wrote, We think we live in a place or we know a person or we have a parent, but it isn’t true. We are those things. They build us. They’re what we’re made of.
I’m made out of Willis, Karen wrote. I see him in the mirror more often than I like. I hear his voice in my voice.
She discovered that her hand was shaking.
She wrote—bearing down hard with the point of the Bic—I think about Michael, too.
Michael is made out of me.
And in this dangerous thing we have begun— dear God, she wrote, I wonder if that is enough.
She closed the journal and was about to switch off the small desk light when Laura said, “Wait.”
Karen turned abruptly. “You scared me … I didn’t know you were awake.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt.”
They were alone in the room with midnight snow heaped on the windowsill and the faint, far hum of the furnace. Karen wore a quilted robe over her nightgown; Laura was tucked up under a comforter.
“Been quite a visit,” Laura said.
Karen smiled. “Hell of a visit.”
“Foundlings,” Laura said.
“Gypsies,” Karen said.
“That’s us.” Laura sat up in bed hugging her knees. “Have you looked in the bottom drawer?”
Karen frowned. She had never been especially fond of surprises. And she was tired. But she opened the big drawer slowly.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”
“You remember them, too?”
From among the toys Karen picked out the pink, fleshy baby doll. It was tiny; it was naked; dust had infiltrated the pores of the plastic.
“Baby,” she said. She looked at Laura wonderingly. “It wasn’t a dream.”
“None of it was ever a dream. That’s the scary part, isn’t it?”
Karen explained about the dream she had dreamt periodically almost all of her life, the house on Constantinople and Tim’s doorway into that cold industrial city. Laura nodded and said, “That’s more or less how I remember it. Tim was always the explorer. Still is, maybe.”
She replaced the doll where she had found it. There was something unpleasant in the feel of the plastic. “You think we can find him?”
“I think we have to try.”
“You think he still hates us?”
“You think he ever really did?”
“I don’t know,” Karen said. The question troubled her. “It’s been so long …”
She yawned in spite of herself.
“Hey, me, too,” Laura said. “Bedtime. Long drive in the morning.”
But they left the light burning through the night.
3
Willis helped Karen carry the last bag out to the car.
Jeanne stood on the porch with a heavy cloth coat clutched around her. It was a cold day but clear; the sky was a deep winter blue. Everybody had said goodbye; everybody had waved. Michael and Laura were huddled in the car now; the engine was running impatiently.
Willis hesitated with his hand on the open lid of the trunk. His eyes were inscrutable behind his bifocals.
He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder. He said, “You understand why I did it?”
She knew instantly what he meant by that. The fear, she thought, the not-talking… and the beatings.
She nodded once, uncomfortably.
Willis said, “But that’s worth jack shit, right? Understanding doesn’t make it better—right?”
She regarded him in his checkerboard winter jacket and his hunting cap, his gray Marine-cut sideburns and his stubbled cheeks.
“No,” she said sadly. “It doesn’t.”
Willis said, “I wish you luck.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“If I could help—” But he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there. His hands were limp and motionless.
Karen climbed in the car up front with Laura, and rolled up the window and did not look back. She did not want Daddy to see her, because she was crying, and how had that happened? What sense did that make?
4
Willis stood a long time watching the car disappear up the road.
There was a raw wind coming from the north down the valley of the Polger and his cheeks were red and burning, but Willis didn’t care. He watched the car vanish around the corner from Montpelier onto Riverside, and stood a long time after that, hand up to shield his eyes against the sun, staring down these old row houses toward the far brown ribbon of the Mon.
He was surprised when he felt Jeanne’s hands on his arms, his wife steering him gently up the porch.
“Come in and warm up,” she said.
Her voice was kind. But the cold air lingered, the rooms were all too big, and the shadows were crowded with voices and time.
Interlude
NOVUS ORDO
1
Cardinal Palestrina was introduced to the upper echelons of the Washington diplomatic community, a few of whom were aware of his task here: the German envoy Max Vierheller and a man named Korchnoi from the Court of the Tsar.
Korchnoi drew him aside at a party at a Republican senator’s Virginia estate: led him out to a glassed veranda and lectured him as snow fell beyond the perimeter of the hothouse plants.
“Of course you know,” the Russian legate said in English, “it’s not simply a matter of this weapon or that weapon.” He gestured effusively with a goblet of Aztec wine. “What the Americans are offering is their involvement in the war. Does it really matter what gift they choose to signify it? It’s ceremony. Theater. The important thing is the prospect of an alliance between Rome and America. The infidels are terrified of it.”
“Until recently,” Cardinal Palestrina observed, “the Americans were the infidels.”