The Vanished Child Read online

  Louis waited in the rich, dark, faded hallway, by a mirror that reached to the ceiling, next to a cabinet full of multicolored china. One of the other servants drifted in and watched him, as if they thought he was going to steal the silver tray on the hall table. Solidarity, Louis thought, nodding at the servant, but the man looked down his nose at Louis. Louis heard men’s voices from far away in the big house, polite tones, quiet. One of the voices was Reisden’s. It raised in a question, and then Reisden came out into the hall.

  He was dressed for dinner, in a dinner jacket, like a rich man. Louis had never seen Reisden do that in his life. While Louis watched, the expression drained out of Reisden’s face and left it pale.

  “Louis.” Just from the name, Louis could tell Reisden was speaking English, which they never spoke between them. He had changed, and the change stood between them like a distance.

  “Sacha, qu'est-ce que tu fous là?" Louis exploded. “Qu’est- ce que c’est que cette connerie?”

  “Laisse. Je viens.” Reisden’s voice was expressionless. He went back through the door and Louis heard a muttering, the high voice of an old man. The butler held Reisden’s coat and hat. Was this what Reisden wanted?

  A cab was going past the big front door; Reisden stopped it with a gesture and said something to the driver. “Shall we just drive?” he asked Louis in French.

  “No. ” Louis didn’t want to drive in a closed cab. He wanted to know where he was. “We could sit and talk there.” He pointed to a bench in the long narrow park down the middle of the street.

  “No.”

  “And I can’t talk to you in that house, hey?” Louis jerked his thumb back.

  “No, you can’t,” Reisden said levelly.

  “I embarrass you, in a house like that? Is that it?”

  Louis looked at the housefronts going by, one after another after another. Reisden sat on the other side of the cab, saying nothing and not looking at Louis. He was very thin and looked oddly handsome in the gentleman’s getup, but wrong, like a waxwork, as if he had glass eyes. “I embarrass myself by being there,” Reisden said after a while.

  “But what are you doing there? Who’s this Richard Knight? What have you done?”

  They came to the center of the city. Reisden paid off the cab and got out first, ducking his head as he always had because he was tall. As Louis leaned out he saw a couple of men standing on the sidewalk; one poked the other on the arm and pointed right at Reisden. Reisden got back in without looking; his arm struck Louis across the nose. Louis cupped his hands over his nose. “Shit! Shit! What’s the matter with you?”

  “They recognized me,” Reisden said, as if it explained everything.

  Louis felt a fearful irritation. They recognized me. The butler. A bookcase full of old cups and plates, not matching. The look of the house, like a posh hotel, the querulous high voice far away, and no room for his friends. He pinched the bridge of his nose to see whether it was swelling.

  Reisden gave the cabdriver a direction. The horse clopped through narrower, darker streets until they reached a hotel, someplace shabby and anonymous.

  No one was ever recognized there, Louis thought.

  At that time of night everyone was in the bar, listening to a singer. Louis wanted a beer. “We’ll have coffee,” Reisden said. The coffee shop was below the street, muggy, deserted, dark; the coffee smelled like it had been made in a train station. Reisden sat facing the door, his face dim. Down the stairs from the floor above fell bits of laughter and off-key music.

  “Tell me what is going on,” Louis said. “Tell me what you want from this.”

  Out of his wallet Louis brought the clipping from the New York paper that had brought him here. The headline was “MISSING HEIR FOUND” With it was the letter Reisden had sent instead of coming to New York. Louis stabbed the two with his finger.

  Reisden picked up the clipping as though it had nothing to do with him. His mouth tightened as he read it. “I didn’t intend to stay here. You knew that; I wrote you.” Reisden dropped the clipping back on the table and pushed it back toward him. He was speaking low, expressionless but hurried. Like a corpse saying, I am so sorry not to tell you what you want to know, but excuse me, I have to be buried now.

  “You wrote me a letter with no return address. I couldn’t read the postmark. I didn’t know where you were. You disappeared. I didn’t know if you were alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” Reisden said. “But you see I am alive.”

  Louis handed the letter over as if it were a card he were trumping. “I want an explanation. Who am I, the dog? For the dog you put down a paper. What are you doing?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “That’s not good enough. Are you Richard Knight? You can’t be.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in New York talking with O’Brien? He says you and he worked on some very good approaches at the conference.”

  Reisden turned away impatiently, then back, a little movement, only sketched, nearly impassive. The coffee shop was lit by gaslights; Louis gave the chain of the one nearest them a couple of tugs, and the light wheezed up a little more brightly.

  “I told him some things he could do. I am—” Reisden shrugged as if looking for a word, not finding one, or not the best one. “I am pretending to be Richard Knight, for reasons too odd to go into. It will probably take most of the summer. I didn’t expect it to. And I cannot possibly explain to you why I am doing it.”

  “No, you’re going to. What the h—l are you doing?”

  He had been looking at Louis, and now he dropped his eyes, then looked around the room as if distracted, looking for some face in a crowd that wasn’t there. A thin line of muscle set very tight against his jaw, and he wouldn’t look at Louis for more than a moment, not even bothering to hide that he didn’t want him here. When had Reisden been like this before? Reisden was very capable at being impolite; that was a natural part of being brought up rich. The time before—Louis remembered when. The hairs on his arms rose up from animal cold.

  “Reisden!” he shouted, as though Reisden had been about to step over a cliff.

  Reisden turned his eyes back with that same odd, cold, breakable politeness.

  “I’m going to say this one time in my life. You can’t get away with this.” Reisden looked straight at him, not seeing him at all. “I’m an old man; you’re twenty-seven. You’re the Baron von Reisden. Everybody takes you seriously; everybody thinks I’m the man who cleans the floor. I care about chemistry. You do chemistry, you do it very well, but you are not going to waste my time with—” He couldn’t say it. “After Tasy died, I watched you losing control of yourself, for months, and you knew it, and you wouldn’t talk to me. You tried to kill yourself, but you wouldn’t talk to me. You did that to me. Once. No more.”

  “I did that to you?” Reisden said, very gentle, looking at him for once. “If I knew what the h—l I am doing to myself, I would tell you what it was.”

  “That’s a lie, Sacha. You wouldn’t.”

  Reisden waited too long without replying, staring past Louis; it was hard for Louis to remember the young man once, long ago, who had come to see Louis at his office in London. I came to learn chemistry.

  “Come to New York with me. You need to.”

  “I can’t,” said Reisden.

  “Sacha, you’ll kill yourself. Stop.”

  Reisden simply got up and took his coat and hat, turning away. Louis jumped up and grabbed him by the arm. Reisden put his two hands on Louis’ shoulders and shoved him down into his chair and stood over him. He was frightening, eyes staring and remote. He says he’s crazy, Louis thought, but he is crazy. Louis looked up at him. Reisden gave him one more look, a quick, cruel, horrified look like fingers flicking lint off his sleeve. Then he was gone.

  Louis heard change clinking on the bar as he went. Reisden had paid for the coffee.

  “That’s enough,” Louis said out loud.
Ça, c’est fini. He was not going to forgive Reisden for this. For being the Baron von Reisden in evening dress and treating him like a pig farmer. For paying for the coffee. For— Louis sat at the table and played with the light, turning it down until it popped and went dark.

  For what, ouais, he knew for what. Louis had run out of ways to stop him.

  But he’d never forgive him.

  The car

  Just before they went up to William Knight’s house in New Hampshire, Reisden leased a car.

  Automobiles like the one he wanted were not bought. One knew people and got on lists. One waited until the maker decided to build one’s auto, and waited while he did—it could take two years to build a good racing car. Reisden pulled strings. He was introduced to a man who had a car he couldn’t drive.

  In Brookline, the auto was stabled by itself in a tree-shaded garage on a big estate. It was a heavy black brute with a long scratch down its side. The chauffeur shook his head. “This one’s a bastard. Drives big and mean, throws its weight away from you when you try to take a corner. Fights you all the way. We wanted to do the Glidden Tour this year, but not with this animal.”

  “It has power?”

  “It’ll do a hundred on a straight, and Dead Horse Hill didn’t even faze the sucker. I wouldn’t try Mount Washington with it, though. First time you try a bad curve at speed, bastard’ll tip like a drunk.” The chauffeur spat. “Go ahead, wreck the son of a bitch. We’re insured.”

  “Gilbert’s goin’ to be terrified,” Daugherty remarked that night.

  “For Richard,” Reisden said absently. He had the housing off the steering, looking to see what could be done with it.

  “Harry wants to drive ’er, too.”

  Reisden moved him aside and unscrewed the floorboard, playing a flashlight down into the connections between steering gear and axle. Once he’d seen one of these chain drives explode like shrapnel. He saw Harry driving this black brute, with his Perdita beside him. The image stung shockingly. “Harry will not,” he said sharply. “That’s a bad design. If the chain catches on the housing it’ll rip apart.”

  “Goin’ to kill yourself?” Daugherty said dryly.

  Reisden wiped his hands on a rag and lit a cigaret, wondering how much Daugherty actually knew about that. The two men’s eyes met and the silence lengthened. “No, goin’ to cut back the housing,” he said finally, mocking Daugherty’s accent, which was low of him; Daugherty didn’t notice, or pretended not to.

  “Just don’t want Harry to drive it,” Daugherty suggested.

  “It’s top-heavy as well.” Harry and Perdita would never drive together in an auto like this. Not if he could help it.

  “If I’d got to live around that boy,” Daugherty said indirectly, “sometimes he’d get on my nerves.”

  Reisden shook his head. “It’s Richard gets on my nerves.”

  When Gilbert no longer believed in Richard, which must happen soon, Reisden would escape in the big black auto. Get away, drive all the way to New York. It would take days, and as long as he was moving between here and there, he could be neither who he was nor what he had got himself into.

  Reisden stubbed his cigaret out.

  Methodically he wrapped electrical tape around the wheel and listened to the muffled Boston traffic, trying to forget the sound of the engine and the smell of cold November air, and the memory of a wheel under his hands.

  To Lake Matatonic

  Gilbert tapped the eggshell with his spoon and fumbled for words, finding nothing to say. A maid pulled the blinds down one by one and cut the morning out of the house. Mr. Phillips threw dustcovers over Gilbert’s chair in the library and shrouded the family portraits. Richard’s portrait disappeared under linen as it had never done before; in almost nineteen years, Gilbert had never gone even as far as Nahant overnight; and living Richard, whose work all this was, sat taciturn on the other side of the breakfast table, with his coffee cold in front of him. Gilbert reached for a piece of the morning newspaper and gathered it about him. Richard stared over the edge of the world and accepted a second cup of black coffee, but did not drink it either. Harry wasn’t down yet.

  “We’ll miss the train,” Gilbert said. He did not want to go to Matatonic; but he didn’t want to keep the train waiting. That was another misery. The Knight family owned two railroad cars, in storage since Heaven knew when, and they were taking one of them up to Matatonic. Traveling nowhere, Gilbert had not been so conspicuous since Father died. He wondered if Richard remembered his grandfather’s parlor car. Even the upholstery had made Gilbert uncomfortable, hairy plush green cushions round and stiff as limes.

  “I wish we didn’t have to go,” Gilbert said.

  Richard seemed about to say something with an edge to it; but instead he made it a quotation. “ ‘If ’twere done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’” Gilbert smiled and Richard gave him a half smile in return. If it were done quickly, Gilbert thought. The only consolation he had was that Father’s portrait was under linen too. But they were going to Father’s house.

  Gilbert rang the bell. “Could you please tell Master Harry how late it’s getting?”

  Richard snapped his watch shut and lit a cigaret.

  “Richard, I can’t get used to your smoking. Don’t you think cigarets and all that coffee, and nothing to eat, will make you sick on the train?”

  Richard only looked at him, all distance, as if he hadn’t even heard him. Gilbert hoped against hope. “Just a little bit of toast?”

  In the hall on a tarpaulin were piled a trunk, suitcases, Harry’s tennis rackets. Gilbert had not known there was such a thing as a tarpaulin in the house. What were they used for? Tarpaulins were for bicycle trips, tents, a cloth on the ground. When the athletic Famums down the street left for Cold River, their cab was piled high with tarpaulins.

  “Richard,” he said desperately, “I wonder when was the last time I left this house.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I wonder why we have got a tarpaulin.”

  “Pardon, sir,” said Lucy, bringing in some of Mrs. Stelling’s shirred eggs, “it’s to protect the carpets.” From what? Gilbert thought, startled. Mr. Phillips went through the breakfast room with a china clock cradled in his hands.

  The Sèvres clock was going into storage. It had stood on its mantel since after Father’s funeral, when Gilbert had quietly put away the black marble tomb that had told Father’s time. The shepherds and all the china figures of fancy threw out their arms on their way to banishment.

  “I feel as if I were dead and all the house breaking up.”

  He said it very quietly and Richard did not hear him. Gilbert desperately drank a second cup of coffee himself. Muffled in newspapers and excelsior, the Sèvres clock chimed eight. The smell of oilskins and tarpaulins and dust hung over the breakfast table.