Exiles in the Garden (18 page)

Alec read her letter in the garden late one afternoon. He had not bothered to unsling his camera bag and it hung heavily from his shoulder, unnoticed. When he got to the part about Nikolas and Lucia seducing each other he tried to recall him, what he looked like and how he spoke, his bearing. And he remembered Nikolas quite well, a burly young man with a mop of dirty hair, a beaked nose and a heavy belly, a white scarf, a man easy to pick out in a crowd. He knew it, too. He was Hungarian or Polish, a youthful spirit despite his bulk, younger in age than heedless, overwhelmed Lucia. If there was danger, Alec had not seen it. He stared at the letter in his hand trying to recollect this Nikolas. He did not remember whether they had ever spoken. He thought not, though there were so many of them—Czechs, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians—in and out of the garden next door he could not be sure. They were all damaged goods, a second-rate theatrical troupe giving nightly performances of the heartbreak of central Europe. Alec had listened to them for hours at a time, achieving sympathy but not understanding. They did not seem to mind. Probably to understand them fully you had to have been there at the beginning, whenever the beginning was—Xerxes, Martin Luther, 1848, 1917, Munich in 1938. This Nikolas was too young to care about it. No, he wasn't. Heartbreak would be wired into his genes. Alec remembered that he had written a scandalous novel.

The light began to fail. From inside the house Mrs. Bazaroff called to him but he did not answer. Then he said, Just a moment, please, in a voice he knew was not his own. Alec continued reading but could not get the sense of what Lucia was writing. Something about Mathilde, something more about arrangements for custody and child support and the things she had left behind. It seemed to him she was writing in a foreign language, verbs and subjects in violent disagreement. One thought led to another without transition. Her handwriting was sloppy, the words aslant on the page in blue ink; the letters resembled sloops bearing into a brisk wind. They had had such a good time on Chesapeake Bay, perfect weather, the boat all you could ask for. Lucia thought that the motion of the sea and the smell of salt water was sexy. She said it again and again. She was right, too. They had sailed Chesapeake Bay for ten days and not had a conversation with another human being; instead, Lucia talked to the crabs. Something childlike about it but wondrous also. He had taught her how to sail, explained the difference between the main and the jib, compass bearings, the tides. She was a natural. He remembered that they were going to buy a boat but never got around to it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs. Bazaroff in the doorway, and then she turned her back and moved silently into the house. Alec came to the end of Lucia's letter understanding no more of what he was reading except that she was gone and would not return. Zurich was her home. Her life she would share with Nikolas. Alec could not imagine what had gone wrong so suddenly except of course he was not to blame himself, whatever it was. Alec realized that she had not given his last name, as if Nikolas was all her husband needed for a positive identification. Then he returned to the beginning of the letter and saw that she had. But her handwriting was so bad that he could not read it exactly. His name was Janos or Junot, something like that.

Inside the house the telephone rang but Mrs. Bazaroff did not answer and the caller gave up. Alec folded the letter and stood tapping it against his thumbnail. That morning he had been in Des Moines, at a rally for a Democratic House candidate; Hubert Humphrey was the featured speaker. Humphrey and Kim Malone were close friends and allies, so the former vice president invited Alec into his hotel suite to photograph him with the candidate and his advisers, an important strategy meeting, one last push to save the Senate and the House for the Democrats. Humphrey looked exhausted, his face drained of color. He and the candidate and the advisers had been talking about the war, a discussion that had left them dispirited. Alec sent the photograph by wire to the newspaper and his editor was delighted, an exclusive shot, Humphrey jowls-to-the-floor. Take a week off, Alec. Spend some time with your family. Alec caught a midday flight to O'Hare and two hours later a nonstop to Washington, all in all an easy day. He had not heard from Lucia in weeks but he had the idea she would be waiting for him when he returned, a surprise; and Mathilde had been out of sorts, wondering where her mother was.

He had bought something for Mathilde in Iowa but now couldn't remember what it was. The letter still in his hand, Alec walked to the rear of the garden to look at the yellow roses, dim in the half-light. He thought they needed water. Washington was in a state of autumn drought. Roses never grew as nicely in this garden as they had in the small garden that measured twelve by twenty feet. Probably it was the soil. Perhaps the light was wrong. Roses needed beaucoup sunshine to thrive. But drought was the real enemy. Of course the garden was too crowded, too many varieties of plant life. The nasturtiums and hollyhocks were especially frumpish. He wondered if he should try to buy back his old house. This one was too large for him now. Interior spaces weren't all they were cracked up to be. Alec turned on the sprinkler and listened to the hiss of the spray.

He returned to Lucia's letter in order to read the last sentence once more. He held the paper close to his eyes, the light was so poor. Really, it was only ambient light reflected from the clouds that hung low over Washington.

I tried so hard, she wrote.

Mrs. Bazaroff called again from the interior but Alec did not reply. He was testing the sincerity of Lucia's last sentence. He read it again and again, a heartbreaking four-word sentence. He wondered if it had come to her naturally or if she had to think about it, her pen between her teeth, trying one line after another until she found the one that struck a clear note. He supposed she was sincere. There would be no reason why she would want to lie at such a time. Lying was not in her nature. Lucia had always been straightforward. Forthright would be the word, a quality the Swiss were meant to have in abundance, along with a tremendous capacity for affection. Well, probably the Swiss were no more affectionate than anyone else—Americans, say, or Hungarians. Affection came hard in a cold climate, witness the Germans. Alec thought back over her letter, her attempts at explanation (if that was the word), and concluded she had help writing it. The phrases seemed to come from another culture or, more pointedly, another decade, a decade in the future, perhaps the 1980s. No one knew what the eighties would bring. Each decade had its signature. The Silent Generation of postwar conformity; the Me Generation; in the twenties it was dancing barefoot in the fountain of the Plaza Hotel; in the sixties stoned at Woodstock. Alec thought Lucia's letter was prophetic in some way he could not explain.
The way I felt was lawless.
Assisted or not, he believed she was writing from some future time. In a decade or two her letter would achieve coherence.
I tried so hard,
and perhaps she had. All the same, Alec felt she had clubbed him in the stomach.

He turned away, his mind filled with static, harsh and unintelligible. Darkness gathered. When Alec looked up he saw only the thin layer of clouds that shrouded the Washington sky. No stars were visible. Alec stared at the blank slate above and concluded he had put faith in the wrong system, the one that was misleading, well out of date. He had misunderstood the cosmos. He had held with the Ptolemaic system in which the sun eternally revolved around the earth when there was much evidence to the contrary. In order to keep faith he had done what the medieval people had done, proposed that the sun moved around the earth while at the same time the planets moved around the sun. The dance floor revolved as the dancers waltzed, everything in motion. There were no fixed points in the universe. This seemed to give them comfort, and in due course they tried Galileo for heresy. Alec smiled at this thought as he continued to gaze at the concealed heavens. After a moment he turned to walk back into his house.

Lucia will not return, Alec said to Mrs. Bazaroff. She is remaining in Europe.

It had taken Alec twenty minutes to tell the story but his father had drifted away after five, barely into the hors d'oeuvres. He heard nothing about the count and countess, Ambassador Kryg, Nikolas Janos, or Lucia's father. Nothing about sailing on the Chesapeake Bay or the ordeal of Ed Weekes. Alec continued anyhow to give an account of those early days which had apparently been so mysterious to his father. When he fini shed talking his voice was barely a whisper. The old man was sleeping soundly now, his face waxen but his breathing regular as a metronome. He looked older when he was asleep than awake. Looking at him, Alec had a feeling not of consanguinity but of longevity; they had been in the way of each other for a very long time. Rarely did a day pass without his father entering his thoughts in one guise or another. When the nurse looked in, Alec asked her how long the old man had. She said it was hard to know, and in any case she did not do predictions. Alec said, Take a guess, I won't hold you to it. The nurse thought a moment and said, More than a week but less than a month. He was failing obviously, each day a trial, but his heart was strong.

He likes it when you come, she said.

I know he does, Alec said.

He looks forward to it. He asks me to read the headlines in the paper so he's up on things. The war, the election.

He has most of his marbles, Alec said.

Was he really a senator?

Really was, Alec said. A good one, too.

Sometimes, you know, they make things up. We have the king of Sweden down the hall. Every few days he calls one of us in to announce a Nobel Prize. Harmless old man, sweet-tempered. She smiled briefly and said, Stay as long as you like, I'll be back to check on him in an hour.

Alec stepped to the window and looked out. The hour was late and it was nearly dark except for the lights on the lawn of the hospital. He saw activity on the sixteenth green and cupped his eyes to the glass so he could see better. It took him a moment to focus. A boy stood in the sand trap lofting ball after ball to the green. He would hit one shot and drop a fresh ball and hit another. After each shot he carefully raked the sand, as any professional caddie would do. The boy looked to be no more than ten or twelve years old, tall for his age and skinny, probably one of the weekend caddies or the son of a member who lived nearby. Then Alec noticed an older man standing off to one side, his arms folded across his chest, watching the play with fatherly pride. There were a dozen or more golf balls on the green, some of them only inches from the cup. The boy was a prodigy. Finally he gave a last sweep of the rake, collected the balls on the green, and walked off down the fairway with his father. Through the open window Alec heard their companionable laughter.

Then he was in his car and driving back to Washington, thinking about the boy practicing sand shots. Doubtless he saw himself one day as a member of the PGA Tour, making a Sunday run at the Masters or the British Open, knocking a sand shot two inches from the pin, applause filling his ears and trying not to notice because applause was a distraction, a concentration breaker. The point wasn't the applause, the point was the ball in the cup. Alec had caddied occasionally for his father on weekend afternoons, the men talking politics as they lined up putts. Alec would drift off into one of his reveries and forget to remove the flag or follow the line of his father's drive as it sliced right into the rough. He would be thinking about the blond-haired girl in geometry class or what he had planned for the weekend. His father would yell at him,
Watch the goddamned ball,
and Alec would come to just soon enough to follow the ball's flight, bending right into the rough and bouncing into the woods, out of bounds. His father barely noticed. Ball flight was Alec's assignment. By then the senator was engrossed in a discussion of the supplemental appropriation, completely screwed up by the idiots in the House. When he reached the ball and found it unplayable he picked it up and lofted it back onto the fairway, still talking about the House and what was to be done. Alec decided he was not made to be someone's caddie, especially his father's caddie.

Alec turned on the radio, German music from the classical station.

Traffic was light in early evening but he was driving slowly, troubled by the lights of oncoming cars. His eyes were getting worse each day. He had difficulty reading the newspaper in the morning, though by noontime he was focusing all right. Alec plodded past the Pentagon and over the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the Jefferson Memorial, reflected unsteadily on the corrugated surface of the Tidal Basin. The reflection looked like one of Pollock's expressionist canvases.

Alec was trying not to think about the story he had told the old man—early days in Washington, something out of the ordinary, something unexpected, his mysterious life—but that proved difficult. He had never spoken the whole story—beginning, middle, and end—to anyone. When he was younger he had ruminated on it often, measuring the what-ifs. He had long since decided that the events of those years were fated. He believed he had the story correct in its essentials: the house next door, the exiles in the garden, Lucia's fascination with the Count and Countess d'An, and his own strange brooding on the Ptolemaic system of fathoming the cosmos, a reverie sure enough. They really had called the White House "the Palace" and Walta Bin-yameen was a frequent reference. And Alec truly was the last to know, and from that he concluded that he was incapable of grasping how people actually behaved; he had never counted himself a prophet. He supposed that all the guests-of-many-languages were gone now. If the Count and Countess d'An were alive they would be of very great age, early nineties at least. A year or so after Lucia left him, Alec had a letter from the d'Ans in Kleinwalsertal. Nikolas and Lucia had come for a visit while they were touring southern Germany. Mathilde was with them. Such a charming child, Alec. You must be very proud. Lucia looked well. No mention was made of Nikolas. Tactful silence, Alec thought at the time, though simple negligence may have been closer to the mark. Alec had not answered the letter.