Innocence: A Novel (24 page)

When Gwyneth finished, she sat with her head bowed, her hands resting on the keyslip, her face blushed by trembling candlelight.

She said nothing. I knew that I should give her silence as long as she wanted it, but I asked in a whisper, “What was that music?”

“The first was Beethoven.”

“Yes, I know. ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ But the second?”

“It’s my own composition. I wrote it in the week after my father died. It’s an expression of the pain … the pain of losing him.”

“It’s beautiful. I didn’t know you had such great talent.”

“Don’t be so awed. It’s just a thing I can do. A gift. It’s not work to me. I didn’t earn it.”

“You must have recorded the piece you just played.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s music only for him and me. And, this time at least, for you.”

“But I’ve heard it before.”

“You can’t have.”

As she began to play it again, this time pianissimo, I said, “But I have heard it many times. In my rooms under the city. And I can never trace it to a source.”

I stood in silence as she played the piece through to the end. The last note traveled away from us like a slow bird floating higher on a warm current of air.

After a silence, I said, “I really do hear it some nights.”

“I believe you.”

“But if you’ve never recorded it and no one else ever has …”

“Nevertheless, you’ve heard it. I don’t know how. But I think I might know why.”

I didn’t quite follow the logic of not-how-but-why, and yet I asked, “Why?”

At first she replied with silence, but then: “I don’t want to say—and be wrong. I don’t want to hope for the wrong thing.”

Her cell phone rang. She put it on
SPEAKER
. “Hello?”

All silken tones had been washed from the voice by bad whiskey, and the words came rough and low, as if spoken through a stone-filled craw. “Miss Gwyneth, it’s me.”

“Is something wrong, Simon?”

“Some guys they’re lookin’ for you.”

“What guys?”

“Neighbors at two of your apartments called me, said these guys came around askin’ about you. Your neighbors they didn’t much like the look of these guys, thought I should know.”

“My neighbors hardly ever see me come and go. I don’t know them, Simon, so how do
you
know them?”

“Well, Miss Gwyneth, they’re friendly, and I gave ’em my number in case, you know, there was ever a plumbin’ leak or somethin’ when you weren’t in residence.”

“The neighbors have the number of the property-management company, and that’s all they need. Simon, I told you never to talk about me to anyone.”

Her tone of disappointment seemed to distress him. “No, no, I never did. I never talked about you. I told ’em the other name, not your real one, and all we talked about was stuff, you know, just this and that, the way people do.”

She got to her feet. “But you gave them your phone number. Simon, you’ve got to get out of there right away.”

“Out of here? Out of my nice little place? Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. Those men will be coming for you.”

“But, Miss Gwyneth, those neighbors, they have just my phone number, not my address or even my last name.”

“The men who’ll be coming for you have connections, friends in high places, resources. They’ll find you eventually.”

“But where would I go? I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

“Go to my guardian. I’ll call him and tell him to expect you.”

“Even in good weather that’s too far, Miss Gwyneth. In this blizzard, it’s impossible far, I mean for a man my age.”

“You still don’t drive?”

“My history, they’ll never give me a license, Miss Gwyneth. Who needs to drive in the city anyway? I got my bicycle and taxis, I do all right, but you can’t bike in deep snow, and no taxi is comin’ out in this storm.”

She hesitated, and then said, “I’ll come for you, Simon. I’ll drive you.”

“If those guys come around here, I won’t tell them the littlest thing. Not even the littlest. You know I won’t, Miss Gwyneth. I’d die first.”

“I know, Simon. But I don’t want you to die, and it might come to that. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Bless you, Miss Gwyneth, I’m sorry to be trouble to you. You’re an angel, and I didn’t mean for anythin’ like this.”

“I know you didn’t, Simon. Half an hour. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She terminated the call. “Telford and his kind pass for human but they’re animals.”

“They’re not animals,” I said. “Animals kill only what they need to feed themselves. Animals suffer but they cast no blame for their suffering, and they never envy. Who is Simon?”

“A man who almost lost his soul but found it again. Come on.”

THE FIRST TIME I SAW REAL DOGS, NOT JUST PICTURES
of them, I was eight years old and recently banished by my mother from our house.

Between the church where I was almost beaten and the truck stop where I stowed away aboard a flatbed, I passed through woods alive with whip-poor-wills and tree frogs, crossed wild meadows where flocks of yellow butterflies swarmed up like fallen petals of the sun to which they sought return, before I came upon kept land encircled by a half-collapsed split-rail fence, a pasture where no livestock grazed.

Towering masses of clouds hung low and irregularly across the sky, the electric-blue of late afternoon visible between them. The westering sun flamed across the upper slopes of the cloud mountains, which were kettle-gray underneath, but golden at their summits. The waning day lay between storm and serenity, in an hour of indecision when any scenario might play out.

I vaulted the rail fence and began to hike the field. I had covered perhaps a quarter of it when two dogs came bounding through the grass from my left. One was a German shepherd, the other a mix of shepherd and perhaps a hound of some kind.

Because dogs were the most domesticated species on the planet, I assumed that they wouldn’t be as peaceable as the wild animals of the woods in which I had grown up. Bonded as dogs were to people, surely they shared the prejudices of them. I expected to be attacked and left to bleed to death as they circled and snarled their hatred.

I raced through the grass, though not at a pace that defeated
dogs. When they caught up with me, they didn’t lunge, but instead paralleled me, one on each side, grinning foolishly, tails wagging.

I stopped running, concerned that my fear might be conveyed to them, but I kept moving at a walk. They loped ahead of me, gamboling together, play-biting, tumbling, springing to their feet once more. I feared them still, but it was a delight to watch them frolic.

When I was halfway across the field, they returned, panting, and sniffing. They smelled the church-picnic ham in my backpack. I had eaten two slices for breakfast, but one remained in a side compartment of the pack, wrapped in aluminum foil.

I thought perhaps dogs might after all be as amenable as the animals of the woods. Those creatures had been more of a family than my troubled mother. Without taking off the backpack, I reached the zipper of the side compartment in which I’d stowed the ham. I unwrapped it, tore it into pieces, and fed it to the dogs.

They had perfect manners, each waiting patiently as I gave the other a chunk of ham, back and forth, until the meat was gone. They didn’t snap the morsels from my fingers, but took them with soft mouths. When I said, “No more,” they didn’t insist on further treats.

Just then a voice called out, “They won’t bite. They’re good old boys.”

Fifty or sixty yards away, a man wearing a shooter’s jacket with satchel pockets ambled toward me, carrying a shotgun across the crook of his left arm. In spite of the weapon, he seemed unthreatening, but that would change when he drew closer and saw my face under the hood.

I pulled my scarf up to my eyes and sprinted, expecting a warning shot or a command to the dogs that would set them upon me. Neither came. I leaped the collapsed fence and fled into more woods.

The dogs accompanied me in a spirit of adventure. I shooed them
away, but they would not go. They weren’t seeking more food, and by their demeanor I thought I understood. I dropped to one knee and with my gloved hands rubbed behind their ears and scratched beneath their chins. I told them that they must go at once, before their master thought I might steal them. Just then, he called out, much closer than before. Upon my further insistence, the dogs turned away and retreated to the pasture, though they went with their tails between their legs, looking back repeatedly, as if chastened by my dismissal.

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want.

And as it happened, in a critical hour, dogs did prove to be all that I imagined and more.

THE CITY STEADILY SUCCUMBED TO THE BLIZZARD
, but Gwyneth did not. The chain-wrapped winter tires churned through soft powder and spat it out in compacted wads. Snow fell at nearly two inches an hour, and already more than half a foot mantled the ground, but she still thought this was a perfect night for speed, pressing the Land Rover faster, faster, making it slalom around a few
stalled vehicles that busy tow trucks had not yet snared, taking corners as if the danger of tipping and rolling were obviated by some ruling she had won in court against the laws of physics.

Even as young as I was, I remembered a time when the plows were quick into the streets and the cleanup began even as the storm was still rising toward its peak. These days, judging by the delay in response, you might have thought the city relied, as in an earlier century, on brigades of shovelers who needed time to bundle against the cold and fortify themselves with spirits before reporting, and on wagon sleds and dray horses to haul away the accumulation.

Simon, to whose rescue we were riding, turned out to be the homeless man who, in search of redeemable soda cans to cash in for whiskey money, found the badly beaten, naked little girl in the Dumpster. Decades before that discovery, he had been a young artist whose career was taking off. But something about success scared him so much that, with alcohol as his copilot and a tendency to burn business relationships as if they were slips of a magician’s flash paper, he managed to stall out and crash so spectacularly that in one year he went from sleeping in a penthouse to passing his nights in a bedroll under bridges.

After his breakdown in the doughnut shop, where he brought the battered child, and after he was released from the hospital, he gave up alcohol overnight, without the help of drugs or counseling, or a twelve-step program. Lifting a glass or a bottle of the old poison to his lips, he recoiled from the stench of it, and when he tried to sip it, invariably he vomited. The smell and taste were as foul to him as the malodor in the Dumpster. Each time that he tried to drink, he was forced to confront the realization, which he’d made in the hospital, that it was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.

He lived, sober and industrious, in an eccentric neighborhood, an enclave of picturesque 1920s-era bungalows on a loop of two-lane called John Ogilvie Way, in the southeast borough, near the river.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the city rang with more harmonies than discords, and everywhere there were things to please the eye. But during decades when the government turned to expert planners, much of the past was considered déclassé, if not abhorrent. Architecture that raised in the mind an appreciation of history was deemed embarrassing because much of that history was considered unfortunate, if not shameful. No place could be made for what was quaint or charming or noble. Anything that might be seen as the work of sentimental primitives was torn down and replaced by massive buildings seemingly inspired by Soviet apartment blocks and by forests of steel-and-glass office towers that blazed in daylight as if they were more glorious than the sun that shed it.

The bungalows of John Ogilvie Way became popular with painters, sculptors, and ceramics artists who lived in them and used them also as their personal galleries. The neighborhood survived long enough to become a tourist attraction, a cultural asset about which the city boasted. Because contemporary art is said to be about the future and progress, about abstraction and the impossibility of knowing truth, it is embraced not just by genuine aficionados but also by those who despise the past. So Ogilvie Way remained, encircled by structures that, in their bold expressions of brute power and command, looked as if they were from a parallel world in which Hitler triumphed.

In appreciation of Simon having saved the nameless girl, Gwyneth had bought a house in this enclave so that he could live there rentfree and seek again to explore his talent. It was a spacious dwelling in spite of being a bungalow, with a deep front porch and elements of
Craftsman style. Lights were on in all its windows. She drove a block past Simon’s house and parked on the farther side of the street.

We got out of the Rover.

“We can’t go directly to the front door,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Have to scout the place in case they found him. If something’s happened to Simon, I’ll never forgive myself. I said I’d be here in half an hour, and I wasn’t.”

Consulting my Rolex, I said, “Thirty-five minutes is pretty close. Five minutes can’t have made a difference.”

“Something tells me that it did.”

Even past eleven o’clock at night, lights shone in the windows of nearly all the bungalows. I supposed that artists, who didn’t have to live by the hours of a standard business day, might be most creative when the rest of the world began to grow quiet, that with their talent might come circadian rhythms different from those of us who lacked their particular gifts.