The Sunken Cathedral (12 page)

Elizabeth leans in to examine the photograph of Carol Weisman linked to her husband, the myopic Ethan, and their twin boys. They stand on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, the boys and Ethan holding spears. Ethan took up spearfishing on this vacation, teaching his sons, notorious troublemakers at Progressive K–8, how to spike flounder with one jab. But what did Carol do while her boys were out fishing? Did she paint her toenails? Read Thomas Hardy in the bath? Jog? It seems important, somehow, the most important detail: What Occupied Carol’s Time While the Boys Went Fishing.
^II

Elizabeth reads it all again in the pinprick of light cast by her slender flashlight, something Pete keeps in the top kitchen drawer in a box marked
CONTINGENCIES
. This is certainly a contingency, Elizabeth thinks, although what has led her here, what she intends to do, is as much a mystery to her as Ethan’s pinched smile, Carol’s sunburned squint. There’s something to be discovered; something more to be said. She reads as if looking for the clues to what, the bread crumbs that might lead her there.

Or here, to the left, where Matty and Vicky Tange have been professionally arranged on the steps of an old-timey veranda within pots of erupting geraniums: Vicky in a sleeveless dress and pearls, stick-thin, her wife, Matty, at her side, their daughter, Kristi, adopted from China at fourteen months, dressed as if for a tea party, frilly skirt, frilly top, white gloves, in Matty’s arms.

She came to us as if in a dream, Matty’s written. We dreamt her first. I woke Vicky and said, Kristi.

Vicky said, What?

Let’s call her Kristi, I said.

Let’s call who Kristi? Vicky said. Vicky’s always the last to know!

It took us months to complete the paperwork and then we were literally on a slow boat to China. Or plane! Kristi met us at the gates of the orphanage. Orphanage D-13. There were chickens and I remember the sound of roosters. When you adopt a child, you do not look at her and think, Is this my child? You look at her and think, Oh, here you are.

Here you are, Elizabeth reads, and once again feels the catch in her throat.

I
. She loved best the black-lined jaunty women, angular and sharp, their clothes set off with a neat hat or fluffy poodle on a leash. Illustrations of how it should all turn out if you followed the directions. She would follow the directions. She would cut along the dotted lines then deftly stitch so she could match them, these women in their smart suits and A-line jackets, their belted trench coats and high, slender boots. She had learned how to follow directions in Home Ec and knew exactly what to do. She unfolded the papery patterns inside the packages and cut along the dotted lines with sharp scissors; pinning the pins, the tiny colored balls straight or almost so the machine’s threading would not crush them. She had written a poem about it called “How It Should All Turn Out”: it was the best of the four poems. She had written it quickly, sitting on her bed in the top-floor studio of the three-story Victorian on Elm she rented for $450 a month. Roaches in the sink and a cat who perched atop the kitchen cabinets, peering down as she composed at her small, round table, Pete elsewhere for the time being, the two taking a break for graduate school, they’d agreed. She had a plan. She would get her master’s. She would marry Pete. She would work in marketing or public relations, writing poetry on the side: income as well as tiny, perfect bonsais, compositions of what it all meant. Maybe even a collection or three. What she did not say was
penance,
though this is what her mother heard. They walked in silence. Her mother would later say she loved the gray stone and stained glass of all the empty churches near the Elm Street studio. Elizabeth would later say she liked the linden trees but little else, the entire town gloomy and worn down, as if all the weight of all its books were balanced on its scholarly shoulders, weak from lack of exercise.

II
. They couldn’t have been more different: Ethan’s only-child childhood in Manhattan, the East Seventies, his three years prepping at St. Paul’s, his time at Yale before Harvard Law, his summers in Europe, while Carol, the fourth of five daughters of a sunflower grower in southern Indiana (the Sunflower King!), majored in communications at the University of Illinois before escaping to New York. Her ancestors were of German descent, Carol wrote, men and women who left their country in the early nineteenth century and found themselves in Ohio and then Indiana, a fertile land they immediately recognized as perfect for sunflowers—Ethan’s relatives, on the other hand, were Ashkenazi Jews. But on their blind date they had talked for hours, and only months later decided to tie the knot.

XVIII

S
ometimes, in the early evenings and into their cups, Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread speculate what their Miles might have become had he not foolishly chosen to get behind the wheel of that automobile when he did, though
foolishly
is not a word that Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread would use: Had he been foolish? No. Just tired and overworked, understanding too well what would be required from his studies in the weeks and months ahead and wanting no part of it though of course wanting everything, the world and all its possibilities round and sweet as one of those jawbreakers he loved as a kid; he could almost taste its sweet as he sucked it down to nothing. He was a boy to whom everything came easily and yet also a boy who understood this about himself and knew, in his fingertips, how fortunate he seemed to anyone looking in—this mattered to Miles. It mattered a lot. As a student of history, his
passion,
he said to the friends of Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread’s who sought out Miles at the Whitbreads’ well-attended New Year’s Day open house (the daughters, Lucy and Janet, shy and for the most part assisting the hired help pass), guests who wanted to hear what Miles, now a senior at college and remembered as the valedictorian of the high school class, the captain of the crew team, the sometimes date for their daughters, had up his sleeve.

“History,” Miles said. “I want to understand the place of history in our lives,” Miles said, always earnest, repeating the name of the senior seminar in which he averaged an A.
Understanding the Place of History in Our Lives,
the course book read, its instructor a former member of the foreign service turned mystery writer, a Skull and Bones type who frankly got a kick out of working with the students and would have done it for free, or paid
them,
he said. Miles Whitbread quoted his professor freely at the Whitbreads’ New Year’s Day gathering. Had one or two of the guests expressed any interest in history, Miles Whitbread might have even read to them the opening paragraphs of his final paper for the class, a paper on the topic of his great-uncle already in its third or fourth draft.
^I

Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread found a copy of the draft of their son’s paper tucked in his hunting jacket pocket. The police had given the jacket to the Whitbreads along with the keys and the mints and the school ID and the packet of condoms and peeled skin of an orange found in the glove compartment, the hunting jacket folded in the backseat, they explained, untouched. Indeed the backseat of the automobile looked like the backseat of an automobile anywhere, books and papers, a hockey stick. The automobile sheared in half, scissored just like that, so that if you were to open the back door you might think you were fine. The drunk had opened the back door, stumbling out of his own automobile without a scratch. He had opened the back door thinking it the front door, relieved to see no one there and therefore, he had wrongly assumed, no one dead or dying.

The drunk had crawled into the backseat of the automobile and fallen asleep. When the police arrived on the scene they were baffled by the man asleep in the backseat, thinking him Miles’s passenger though Miles was very much alone, dead in the front seat, shorn and crushed against a sugar maple several hundred yards away.
^II

What if he were with a friend, if he hadn’t been driving? Mrs. Whitbread would say—this after midnight, into her cups, the Whitbreads, social people, had been out somewhere, had returned to their sunroom, ringed, as they were, by framed photographs of Miles and Lucy and Janet.

“What if he had stayed home? Then he would not have been in the car at all,” Mr. Whitbread would say.

The Whitbreads sit in their sunroom, the only room easily heated, electric.

“Or what if he had asked his friend to drive?” Mrs. Whitbread would say.

“Right,” Mr. Whitbread would say.

“I wish he had,” Mrs. Whitbread would say.

“Yes,” Mr. Whitbread would say.

I
. In 1953, on a frozen hill somewhere above the Thirty-Eighth Parallel in what was then Korea, my great-uncle Atticus Charles Whitbread, known as Whit Charles, stood among the cobbled UN forces, the best among them a group of Ethiopians. The men watched as the colonel, nicknamed Shorty, led a cow toward his bunker, warmer than the trenches Whit Charles and the others dug and lived in, shooting rats from the tips of their boots on moonlit nights and on moonless nights picturing worse. Earlier that day, the Chinese had taken Hill 454, or Marilyn Monroe, as they called it. Whit Charles had watched to the north as a soldier shit in a can; he didn’t want to look to the east, where the crucified boy’s face, Air Force, had swollen to the size of a pumpkin. Now the sun had set and left the bitter cold. There was a dusting of snow. The men shivered in their trenches, the Ethiopians speaking a language Whit Charles could not understand. They had beautiful hands and moved them as they spoke as if carving air. Their eyes were wide and white. They were thin as switches and Whit Charles watched as their leader bent down and used his knife to scrape something off his boot before licking the blade with his long red tongue. The next day the Ethiopians were dead but my great-uncle was still alive. Random is the place of history in our lives.

II
. In addition to the death of Miles Whitbread, this same sugar maple had been responsible for the births of hundreds of robins and the deflowering of a virgin named Sophie, who, when she saw how her boyfriend Tray had carved I LOVE SOPHIE in the bark of its trunk in the autumn of 1973, had been so moved as to forget her vow of chastity until marriage, something she had discussed at length with her girlfriends and only later confessed to betraying—the sex sweet: after a picnic and before a rainstorm, the air taut with atmosphere, some kind of rejiggering so that, in later years, Sophie associated weather with desire: a little randy she’d say to her boyfriends, her husband, her lovers, given any tiny shift in barometric pressure, until she grew so old and dry that neither hurricane nor northeaster could interest her at all.

XIX

J
ules and Larry stand at the door. “It’s freezing!” Jules says. “When did New York get so cold?”

“You’re here!” Marie says.

“I told you I would so I did. We did. Besides, you never answer your phone. Anyway, it’s April, isn’t it? Christ it’s cold.”

“Come in, come in,” she says. “Oh my,” she says. “What a surprise.” Larry squeezes past perfumed, a wool scarf of bold university colors wrapped around his neck. “I need a heater,” he says.

“Quick,” she says. “I’ll make tea.”

Jules is next, looking more and more the spitting image; she finds it difficult not to say, Abe. He has not stood in this hallway for some time and now he’s here: Abe, Jules. Jules stands tall, like his father, his hair Abe’s once blond, curly, already gray.

“Your hands are frigid!” Marie says.

“We got the first flight we could manage. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“This place is amazing,” Larry says, returning. “I love the blue.” He has his coat off, and Marie sees he wears a white shirt and tie.

“Larry likes to dress to travel,” Jules says. “It’s a dying art.”

“You look wonderful,” Marie says. “You both look wonderful and look at me,” she says. She stands in housecoat and slippers—it is too early. She had no idea. They must have flown overnight. They must be exhausted. She makes them follow her to the kitchen, Jules insisting on giving Larry a tour now, where he slept as a boy, where he slept as a teenager, though that part, the top floor, is occupied by the tenants. “You’ll hear them tomorrow morning,” Jules tells Larry. “Very loud. There’s always a commotion. Don’t they have, like, five little kids?”

“One,” Marie says. “And he’s already a teenager.”

“I remember it as five,” Jules says. “And possibly dogs.”

Marie says she’ll boil the eggs and please stop: she is not an invalid. She’s perfectly all right. A tiny fracture: on the screen a scratch you wouldn’t notice. She’s old. Bones break. It’s all a bore. She’d been surprised by the cast. It’s all so dumb and stupid. She’ll have none of it, this show. She’s just happy for their company and how long will they stay?

“Unclear,” Jules says. He’s all legs and arms. “Larry’s got something but we’ll see,” he says.
^I

“Mom?” Jules says. But here the water’s boiled away to nearly nothing.

“Let me do it,” Jules says.

“A nine-minute egg,” Larry says, laughing. “Perfect.”

Outside Roscoe balances on the high dividing fence, his tail quivering. In the garden some forsythia spray yellow, and there are already daffodils. Next door the movie star’s birch will be the first to green, and then the few pears that still line the street despite the storms and the moving vans that break their branches, the pears planted, Marie remembers, by the block association—the ones who put on the caroling—formed when the neighborhood was dangerous, when somebody’s wife was mugged: bulbs in the fall, impatiens in spring, the children with trowels digging the sparse dirt at the roots, careful not to nick. “I am impatient with impatiens,” Abe announced though he and Jules were happy those Saturdays, dirt on their knees, beneath their fingernails, in the creases of their palms so that Jules predicted he could read Abe’s whole life there.