Remembrance (48 page)

50

“Vanessa? Vanessa? Are you home?” Teddy walked sedately through the front door, put his hat on the hall table, took off his coat, and peeked into the study. She wasn't there, but as he wandered through the house he suspected that she was in the darkroom. For the past four years she had spent most of her time there. He had had to give up the guest bedroom on her behalf when she discovered photography in her freshman year at Vassar, but she was so good at what she did that it was actually a pleasure.

During the thirteen years she had lived with him almost everything had been a pleasure. They had grown up together, hand in hand, learning and growing, and occasionally fighting like cats and dogs, but there was an enormous respect between them. His mother had died when Vanessa had been twelve, but that was no particular loss to Vanessa. Her grandmother had never accepted the child, and that never changed right up until her death. She left Vanessa none of her vast fortune. She left it all, equally divided, between her two sons. Two years later Greg had died, predictably of cirrhosis, and Pattie had eventually moved to London and married “someone terribly important.” From the rumors he occasionally heard, Teddy assumed she was happy, but he didn't really care if he never saw her again. Once she lost custody of Vanessa, she had entirely lost interest in the girl, and they never saw her. So over the years Teddy and Vanessa had been alone. He had never married, and he had devoted himself wholeheartedly to the task of being a bachelor father. It had its moments of absolute despair, there were moments that were hysterical beyond words, and moments that were worth an entire lifetime. When she had graduated from Vassar the previous spring, it had been a moment that he knew he would always cherish. In some ways she was as lovely as her mother had been, but it was more a similarity of spirit. She had grown up to look exactly like Brad, and sometimes it amused Teddy to see how much she was like him. She had his same long lanky blond good looks, her sense of humor was much the same, her eyes were the same gray-blue, and when she laughed, it was as though he had come back for another life, as a woman. It was extraordinary to watch her, and be with her, she was so dynamic and so alive. It was her energy and her drive that she got from her mother. And she wanted to be not a model but a photographer. She had studied fine arts at Vassar and done very nicely, but all she cared about was what she saw in her camera lens, and after that what she did with it.

Teddy knocked softly on the door, and Vanessa answered.

“Yeah? Who is it?”

“The big bad wolf.”

“Don't come in, I'm developing.”

“Will you be through soon?”

“In a few minutes. Why?” It seemed to him that most of then-conversations were through that door.

“Want to go to dinner?”

“Wouldn't you rather play with kids your own age?” She was always teasing him that he should get married.

“Mind your own business, smartass.”

“You'd better be nice to me, I could sell that picture I took of you last week to the papers. Famous surgeon seen dressed as a bunch of grapes.” He roared with laughter at the memory. She and half a dozen friends had gone as the Fruit of the Loom insignia to a Halloween party, and at the last minute the guy who was supposed to be the grapes couldn't come, and she had pressed Teddy into service. He had been a good sport, but they had also won the prize, so Vanessa had had someone take pictures of them. “How would that look in the medical journal?”

“That's blackmail.”

“You'd better be nice to me. I just sold another picture to
Esquire.”
She had been free-lancing for five months now, and she was doing very nicely.

“You're moving up in the world.” He was still standing in the hallway, talking to the door. “Are you ever coming out of there?”

“No, never,” she shouted back.

“What about dinner?”

“Sounds good. Where are we going?”

“How does P.J. Clarke sound to you?”

“Terrific. I'm wearing jeans and I don't want to change.”

“So what's new?” He was teasing. She was always in jeans, with her incredible blond hair swinging, and assorted army surplus jackets and vests, which made up the rest of her wardrobe. She wanted to be comfortable enough to take pictures at all times. She was in no way preoccupied with her wardrobe.

“I'll get dressed.”

He disappeared into his own bedroom and loosened his tie. He had led two lives for years, that of a sedate, successful surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian, in dark pin-striped suits, white shirts, and dark ties, and then a whole other life with Vanessa. A life of ice skating and pony rides and the zoo and father's days at camp, and hockey games and ice cream parlors. A life of blue jeans and sweat shirts and pink cheeks and windblown hair. She had kept him even younger than his forty-five years and he hardly looked more than thirty. His own blond good looks had held up well, and he actually looked a great deal like her. They had the same lanky frames, the same shoulders, the same smile, it was perfectly conceivable that she could have been his daughter. Once in a while when she was little, she had introduced him as her “Daddy,” but she still called him Teddy, and most of the time she told friends that he was her uncle. She remembered in every glorious detail the day she had been finally awarded to him in court, but of the ugliness of the past, she still remembered nothing.

He had consulted several psychiatrists over the years and they had eventually convinced him not to worry. It was disturbing that none of that had ever surfaced, but it was possible now, they all felt, that she would never remember. She was happy, well adjusted, there was no reason for any of the past to come leaping out. And they also suggested that if he wanted to, once she was an adult, he might want to tell her. He had decided not to do that, she was happy as she was, and the burden of knowing her mother had been murdered by her husband might have been too great for Vanessa. The only possibility that could be of concern was if she suffered some major trauma. In that case, perhaps, some of the memories could be dislodged. When she had been little, she had had frequent nightmares, but she hadn't even had those in years, and eventually Teddy had stopped worrying about it completely. She was just like any other child, happy, easygoing, better natured than most, they had never had any teen-age problems. She was just a terrific kid and he loved her as though she were his own child. And now that she was almost twenty-three, he couldn't believe how quickly the years had flown past them.

He returned to the darkroom twenty minutes later, in blue jeans and a dark brown cashmere jacket with a beige turtleneck sweater. She shopped for him sometimes at Bloomingdale's, and came back with things he would never have bought for himself, but he had to admit that once he had them he liked them.

“Are you ever coming out of there, Mrs. Cartier-Bresson?”

The door opened just as he said it, and she stood before him in all of her towering beauty, her hair flowing around her shoulders like a wheat field, and a huge smile on her face. “I just developed some truly great pictures.”

“Of what?” He looked into her eyes with pleasure. It seemed for all her twenty-three years she had been the hub of his existence.

“I took pictures of some kids in the park the other day, and they're just stupendous. Want to see?” She looked at Teddy with pleasure and he followed her back to the darkroom. She switched the light on, and he looked at the prints. She was right. They were fantastic.

“You going to sell these?” They were really lovely.

“I don't know.” She cocked her head to one side, and the blond mane fell over her shoulder. “There's a gallery downtown that wants my work. I was thinking I might let them show them.”

“They're beautiful, darling. You've done some lovely work in the last few weeks.”

She pinched his cheek and kissed him. “That's just because I have an uncle who buys me great cameras.” He had bought her a Leica for Christmas, and another Nikon for her graduation. She had got her first one for her eighteenth birthday, which was what had got her started.

They walked out of the apartment arm in arm, and they got in a cab that took them to P.J.'s. They went out often in the evening together now that she was back from college. He liked taking her out and going to fun places with her, and she liked being with him, even though sometimes Teddy felt guilty about that. She hadn't had a lot of friends when she was in school. She was kind of a solitary child, and she had always clung to him. At Vassar she had made some friends, but she seemed happier alone with her camera. And with her twenty-third birthday looking at her in a matter of weeks, she was still a virgin. There had been no important men in her life and she seemed to shy away from them. A touch on the hand, a hand on her arm, almost always made her shudder. It was something that worried Teddy a great deal. As the first psychiatrist had said in the courtroom many years before, all of the buried horror she had seen would leave a mark on her life, if it never surfaced. It hadn't, and Teddy wondered if unconsciously she remembered seeing Vasili kill her mother and was afraid because of it. Or was it buried so deep that it didn't affect her? Like shrapnel left over from a long-forgotten war?

“You're awfully serious tonight, Uncle Doctor. Why so quiet? Something wrong?” She was always very straightforward with him.

“I was just thinking.”

“What about?” She was munching on an enormous hamburger and looked about fourteen. He smiled at her.

“About you. How come you're such a good kid? It's not normal.”

“I'm retarded.” She grinned at him and set down the hamburger. “Would you rather if I got into drugs?” She grinned, knowing how he felt about the drug epidemic. Though she didn't know what a deep-seated horror Teddy felt or why.

“Please. I'm eating.”

“Okay, so just be grateful I'm boring.” She knew what he was working toward. She should be going out with some nice young man and not her old uncle. She had already heard the speech ten thousand times, and she always told him in answer that he should be married.

“Who said you were boring?”

“You were about to start picking on me again for being a virgin.”

“Was I?” He looked amused. “You know me awfully well, Vanessa.”

“Hell, I ought to,” she chuckled, “we've been living together for thirteen years.” She said it too loud and several people turned around to stare at them, in particular two women who glared at them in obvious disapproval.

Teddy leaned toward them with his most charming smile. “My niece,” he said sweetly.

“I've heard that one before,” snapped the woman and she turned around at her table as Vanessa burst into laughter.

“You're more outrageous than I am, do you know that?”

The trouble was that they liked each other so much and were so comfortable with each other that neither of them was highly motivated to go looking for anyone else, which wasn't good for either one of them. Teddy had never really got over Serena, and his years of single parenthood had kept him busy enough that he could use it as an excuse not to look seriously for another woman. There had been women now and then, but they never meant very much to him. And in Vanessa's case, she just seemed to shy away from any kind of serious involvement with a man. She grew oddly shy and uncomfortable around them. Teddy had seen her do it. So instead she hid behind her camera, saw all, and felt as though no one saw her.

“It's a damn waste, kid.” He looked at her with a grin as he paid the check.

“What is?”

“You hanging out with me all the time. Besides, I'll never get you off my hands like this. Don't you want to get married?” But whenever he mentioned marriage, there was always terror in her eyes.

“No, never. That's not for me.” It was then that he could see the bits of shrapnel surface. It was always there. She just didn't know it.

The next morning they sat peacefully over scrambled eggs and bacon. They alternated making breakfast every morning. On her days they had scrambled eggs, on his they had French toast. They had it down to a science. They read the paper in sections, with perfectly harmonized rotations. Watching them in the morning was like watching two people perform a ballet. It was all perfectly synchronized, and no one spoke a single word until after the second cup of coffee.

But this morning, when he held out his cup, nothing happened. Instead she sat staring at the paper, with a blank look on her face, and sensing something, Teddy watched her.

“Something wrong?” She shook her head, but she didn't answer. He got up and came around behind her then, and what he saw gave him a jolt. It was a photograph of Vasili Arbus. She was reading the article, but her eyes kept straying back to the picture. The article was brief and said only that he was dead of a drug overdose at fifty-four. It said also that he had spent five years of his life in a mental hospital for having committed murder, and he had been married six times. But for once none of his wives were listed. Not even Serena. Teddy wanted to say something as he watched her look at the picture, but he knew he shouldn't do it. He had to let happen what would happen. It wasn't fair to help her repress it all again. He said absolutely nothing, and she went on looking at the picture for another ten minutes, and then suddenly she looked up at Teddy with a troubled smile.