1975 - Night of the Juggler (14 page)

At this hour there were only a half dozen customers along the bar, and one of these, a large, florid man with cold eyes, was staring with frank and deliberate interest at Barbara’s elegantly slim legs. In the rear of the room the piano player was singing a medley of Noel Coward songs.

“. . . I’ll see you again. . . .”

His voice was sad and muted, the words as blue as the air in the smoke-filled little bar.

Her thoughts were sad and splintered with pain, like the music.

What was London, where she had first met and loved Luther Boyd, if it was not as she had once read, the mighty fleet of Wren, with top gallants and mainsails of stone? . . .

And for some idiotic reason, maybe only because they had been so happy sitting in the lounge bar of the Dorchester, she had said to him, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

And he had asked her, “Is that T. S. Eliot?”

“No, Dylan Thomas,” she had said, and he had made a note of the quotation and the name in his small leather appointments book, and she had liked him for that, had found it touching.

The martini did nothing to ease a bruise that seemed to be in the center of her heart.

Kate had been
their
child, but Buddy had always been
her
child even though Luther had adopted him and given him the Boyd name. But was that a fair assessment or just her depressed imagination at work?

The psychiatrist had asked her if she had any feelings of guilt about not having given Luther Boyd a son. She hadn’t been prepared for that question and hence had blurted out a quick and honest answer: “No, I’m glad I didn’t, Doctor.”

Why had she said that? It was simple enough, and one didn’t need diplomas on the wall from Harvard and Vienna to interpret it. She could not bear even the thought of losing another son.

She asked the bartender for a second martini, knowing she needed this additional crutch for her meeting with Luther, but as she did so, she experienced a revulsion for her own weakness and an active dislike for the person she seemed to be turning into, a neurotic female taking liquid courage under the insolent stares of the florid man at the other end of the bar, who, she knew quite well, would offer to pay for her third drink. . . .

Chapter 11

“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his loneliness more acutely.”

Luther Boyd closed the book he was reading with an irritable snap of his powerful hands and dropped it with a dismissing gesture on the table beside his deep leather chair.

“—feel his loneliness more acutely. . . .”

A draining, weakening thought. . . . He had made an honest effort to involve himself in poetry and ballet and opera because these were art forms Barbara was passionately fond of. But how far could a man force himself? At what point did his simulated interest, his patient study of areas that bored him, wear into thin hypocrisy?

Since he tried to be honest with himself, he reluctantly conceded that it had once been a stimulating challenge to examine musical scores as if they were campaign maps, searching out the trivial or complex reasons behind the writings of plays and novels and operas.

He remembered an afternoon in a hotel in London (where had it been, the Connaught?), he could recall even now the look and texture of the warm sunlight on the backs of Barbara’s slim hands, and as he thought of her then, her eyes shining with grave amusement, quoting words from Dylan Thomas, Luther Boyd felt a stab of poignant pain at all the promises and pleasures they had lost in only these last brief years.

He stood and paced the study of his apartment above Central Park, choosing another book from his shelves, a military manual detailing General Grant’s strategy and tactics while driving his Army of the Tennessee against Forts Henry and Donelson on his battering course through Shiloh to Vicksburg.

There was a lesson in guerrilla warfare to be learned from the confusion of the rebel commanders facing Grant, the mismatched triumvirate of Generals Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner. They had allowed a massive victory to evaporate, to slip from their collective hands that night; faulty intelligence had been part of it, but more important, they had been deceived by chimerical phantoms which had convinced them that the Union forces were still in position, thus causing them to sound retreat against an enemy that had already withdrawn from the field.

But what they took for the enemy had been only the banked Union campfires, whipped into flames by gusting winds to create the illusion of a continuing hostile encirclement.

Boyd checked his watch as he heard, above Kate’s hi-fi, the musical chimes of the front door. This would be Barbara, he thought, as he rose and went into the living room. Injustice is relatively easy to bear, he had once read; what stings is justice. Was that why his mood was so wounded and angry? Because there was justice in Barbara’s position? So let’s get this the hell over with, he thought. As Patton said, a pint of sweat can save a gallon of blood. . . . Don’t think; act.

“I think we’ve wasted too much time and energy in accusations,” Luther Boyd said to Barbara. “Do you want a divorce?”

He stood with his back to her at the windows of the long drawing room, staring at but not seeing the golden glow of the last sunlight in the crowns of towering elms and maples in the park.

Barbara was at the bar making herself a drink. Because his question terrified her, made her feel lonely and shaken, she managed a defiant smile and said to him, “Can I fix you a touch, Luther?”

“I’m trying to be serious, Barbara.”

“You don’t have to
try
to be serious, Luther. You
are
serious.”

“What about it? Yes or no?”

She was frightened at the thought of leaving him, but she was determined to do it, simply because she couldn’t bear his leaving her again and again and again. . . . She had been alone when Kate was born. She had been alone when the wire had come that Buddy was dead. She had been alone on too many nights when her body ached for his love. And she had been alone with him too often when he sat in the same room with her with his thoughts lost in the history of centuries-old campaigns and wars.

He would always leave. The flags on the horizon, the distant thunder of artillery, the challenge of decisions and battles were magnets he couldn’t resist.

And she didn’t want him to leave her. But there was no word from her, no cry, no appeal that had the magic of the lures that streamed like plumes from his concepts of honor and duty, and yes, she thought bitterly, yes, always, the fire-engine excitement of armies on the march. . . .

She put her drink down on the bar, walked across the room, and stopped behind her husband.

“Luther, at the risk of boring you out of your mind, can I try to explain one more time why I’ve come to this decision?”

Boyd turned and looked steady at her. “Of course,” he said patiently.

“This is truly important to me, Barbara.”

While she was trying to collect thoughts that scattered around in her head like mice, there was an excited yelping from the corridor, and Harry Lauder burst into the room, tugging at the leash in Kate’s hands.

Kate ran to her mother and gave her a hug and a kiss while Harry Lauder circled them both with yapping enthusiasm.

Kate knew that her mother and father were being what people called “civilized” about their problem, but she thought it was grossly unfair that she wasn’t allowed to talk to them about it, that she was expected to be just as “civilized” as they were.

“Mommy, I’ll only be gone ten or fifteen minutes. Will you wait here for me?”

“Of course I will, darling.”

“Remember the ground rules, Kate.”

She repeated them in a singsong but cheerful voice. “Stay on the east side of Fifth Avenue, in your own block where Mr. Brennan can keep an eye on you.”

“Right,” Boyd said.

In the lobby, Mr. Brennan pulled on a heavy blue overcoat decorated with gold epaulets and went outside with Kate and, standing under the canopy, looked with affection after the girl who was skipping down the block with her little Scottie.

The wind was fresh and cold on her cheeks and sent strands of her silken blond hair streaming behind her like pennants.

Across the street the same winds played in the big trees of Central Park. Leaves were blown high in the air to spin with errant thermals and finally to drift down into the thick shrubbery bordering the sidewalk along this block of Fifth Avenue. There was a fall fragrance in the air, threaded with the delicate, smoky tang of roasting chestnuts. The elderly vendor had positioned his cart a block south of Kate’s building and was stamping his feet against the cold, his breath hoary in the deepening twilight winds.

Kate, at the opposite end of the block, north of her building, was snug against the weather in small sturdy boots, a blue jump suit, and a red quilted ski jacket with decorative zigzag stitchings on the collar and sleeve. She also wore her green suede shoulder bag because there was a dollar bill in her wallet, and she wanted to buy a bag of hot chestnuts before she went back up to her apartment.

Traffic was light on the avenue. Harry Lauder began barking at something or someone in the bushes across the street in Central Park.

“No, no, no,” Kate said, and pulled him back from the curb. She walked south toward her building then, giving Mr. Brennan a wave and a smile.

She called a greeting to the chestnut vendor, who returned it with a bobbing nod. He was a mute, but his hearing was unimpaired, and he seemed to enjoy the traffic and activity of the street and his limited exchanges with the little blond girl and her Scottie.

Rudi Zahn was a precise and orderly man who took his exercise seriously. He did not stroll through Central Park idly cataloguing birds and trees and flowers, but instead strode the pathways with long, decisive strides, almost as if marching to the cadence of distant martial music. It had rained in the late afternoon that day, a miniature autumn squall, which had had the positive effect of rinsing the air and leaving it as clear and bracing as winds over freshwater lakes.

Rudi was thinking about Crescent Holloway, which in turn led him to remember the pale and ravaged face of Ilana, one of the four survivors from a dozen-odd families who had been deported from Rudi’s village in Bavaria to concentration camps in Poland. At age five Rudi had adored Ilana, who had been a slim, vivacious eight-year-old, charged with tomboyish energies and excitements and graced with a buoyancy of spirit that seemed indestructible to everyone who knew and loved her. She was everyone’s pet, and when the soldiers came, it seemed somehow a special and dreadful outrage that Ilana should be taken away with the other seventy-four Jews of the village.

Rudi’s parents and his older brother and sister had been in that group of seventy-four Jews. But even that had not seemed as incredible and horrifying as the violation of Ilana.

Rudi had been spared through the intervention of the parish priest, who—having been a longtime friend and chess opponent of the rabbi—gave the little boy sanctuary in the basement of the church until the crowded trucks with their wailing cargo had rolled out of the village.

The gray and frightful years had gone by like slow, ominous shadows, and then the Americans came and after them, the survivors, liana and three other children, the only ones left from the dozen families who five years before had charged the streets and shops of the village with their exuberant energy.

And one day an American Army captain, second cousin to the mother of one of the exterminated families, had come to the village in a jeep with a driver and a large American sergeant who wore three rows of campaign ribbons on his Ike jacket and a .45 automatic on his cartridge belt.

The four survivors and Rudi had joined the captain and the sergeant in a cold room to drink American coffee and to eat American chocolate while Ilana told the captain, who was small and wore bifocals and whose name was Adler, what had happened to the people of the village, including the captain’s relatives.

Ilana was now thirteen, shrunken and destroyed, but still beautiful to Rudi, with despairing, haunted eyes which seemed to him the most dreadful symbols of what had been inflicted on her and all the others.

Ilana spoke in German with occasional lapses into Yiddish, and Captain Adler translated her words into English in a voice that was racked by emotion and broken on occasion with stifled sobs.

“There were two lines,” Ilana said, and Captain Adler translated the words to the American sergeant. “One was for the healthy who could work; the other was for the old and sick and crippled, no matter how young they were. That line went into the gas chamber.

The two lines were only six feet apart, separated by soldiers. My mother was walking to the gas chamber. I was in the other line.

When the soldiers were not looking, I got into the line with my mother. I wanted to die with her. I told her that, and she said she would help me. She put her coat around me so the soldiers wouldn’t see. She was crying, and I could feel her heart beating very fast.

But before we reached the door to the gas chamber, my mother pulled her coat away from me and threw me into the arms of a soldier. She screamed that I must try to live. I fought the soldier and tried to get back to my mother; but she was gone by then, and the door had closed. I couldn’t see her. They shoved me into the other line, and I tried for the next years to do what my mother had asked me to do, to try to live.”

But that grotesquely unfair and demoralizing struggle had been an empty victory; Ilana was dead within ten months of her release from the camp, her lungs betraying her unquenchable spirit.

This was the dreadful fear that had been burned into Rudi Zahn’s consciousness, and this was what Crescent Holloway could never understand; she had never in her life been vulnerable and helpless, and she couldn’t conceive how that experience could cripple a person’s character and confidence.

Money, with its consequent privilege and power, was the only specific against such terrors. . . .