The Vanished Child Read online

  “Hope they don’t set off much a them firecrackers. Morning, Miss Perdita. Morning, Harry.”

  Perdita liked Roy Daugherty. When she was little and visited Uncle Bucky’s office, he had always had a few pieces of some kind of old-fashioned candy in his desk.

  “Woods are dry as paper. We ain’t even had mosquitoes up where we been searchin’. I ain’t been letting my men much as smoke up there. I’d be purely disgusted if anyone sets off a box full of fireworks in all them dry leaves.”

  “But they will certainly try it,” Gilbert Knight agreed mournfully, “and the most appalling accidents happen with fireworks. Mr. Daugherty, I heard of a young man who set off what he thought was a very small one, but the manufacturer had put the wrong kind of powder in it and it blew his face completely off. I expect it happens all the time. ”

  “I bet you’d like us to stay inside with the windows closed during the fireworks,” Harry said sourly.

  Perdita squinted to see whether Richard Knight had come with Uncle Gilbert. He had made a practice of not coming into town because of all the notoriety around him. But there he was, a tall shadow. “Good morning, Miss Halley.”

  “Good morning—” She made her own practice of not calling him Richard, since he didn’t like it. “Do you like the parade?”

  “Yes—because for once I am not it. Do you?” A trumpet blatted off-key. She made a face; they laughed together and fell easily into conversation.

  “There is our neighbor Anna Fen,” he said. Perdita saw a tall white dazzle—oh, good heavens, Mrs. Fen was wearing white! And even her eyes could make out the huge green and purple cockade on Mrs. Fen’s shoulder.

  “There’s an association I’ve saved you from, Pet,” Harry murmured.

  “Votes for Women!” Mrs. Fen’s low, carrying voice sounded like someone on stage. “Mr. Knight, wear a button for the ladies. Mr. Boulding, will you take a button from me?”

  “What does it say?” Harry gibed. “‘Free Love’?”

  “Harry!” Perdita hissed.

  “Miss Halley, will you wear a button for yourself?”

  Perdita flushed and took a step back. “I—” She shook her head. Under her hatband her own button pressed against her forehead. Her own sister’s button, but if Harry ever saw it he would think she had got it from Mrs. Fen in secret. Better to disagree with Harry openly once. “Yes, please, Mrs. Fen,” she said, louder than she had meant to. Harry would be furious.

  “Very good, Miss Halley.” Anna Fen pinned the button on her. She was surrounded by a cloud of perfume, a thick, complex odor. That choke of sweets and flowers was the best argument Harry had. It was insistent, like the rest of Mrs. Fen: that flaunted, purring voice and the hands that moved around Perdita’s collar. Perdita felt panicked, as if she had agreed to much more than she knew.

  “Mr. Richard Knight?” Mrs. Fen said.

  “Not Richard, nor American, Mrs. Fen: I don’t vote here.”

  “Neither do we,” she purred back at him. “So you must take a button. Here, I’ll pin it on.”

  Would she pin it on the same way, Perdita wondered, and would Richard Knight smell her perfume while she did it?

  “Well, then,” Roy Daugherty rumbled, “I’ll take me one of those buttons too. Mr. Knight, you want one? Harry?”

  “Yes, I believe I will,” Uncle Gilbert said. “No, thank you, Mrs. Fen, I’ll pin mine on.”

  “Free Love!” Harry muttered.

  The four of them spent the day together: Gilbert, Richard, and Harry and Perdita. It was awkward. Gilbert did not at all like being out in society, not even informally at the parade, since it brought up the dreadful strangeness about Richard. Gilbert tried to introduce him to some people, but Richard smiled and asked him not to: “What name would you give them?” So they kept themselves to themselves at the parade and at the town picnic afterward, and Gilbert stayed a distance away from Richard so that he would not be caught in an introduction, and when people came up to Richard and introduced themselves, Gilbert saw Richard shake his head: no, I’m not Richard, saying it with exactly Tom’s smile.

  It was worse, if possible, with Harry. Away from his friends down in Boston and Nahant, Harry carried Perdita with him everywhere like a toy he had to have. At first Harry made Gilbert introduce him and Perdita: “This is my adopted nephew Harry Boulding and his fiancée, Perdita Halley.” But that was not good either, because so many people asked where Gilbert’s other nephew was, and once, terribly, asked for his real nephew. So Perdita and Harry went around the crowd by themselves, Perdita introducing Harry. “This is my fiancé.” Gilbert finally hid in the Clinic and played a game of chess with Charlie.

  That night the fireworks screamed and banged over the lake like old battles remembered. Gilbert went to bed and dreamed disjointedly of flares spattering red light into the sky, Verey flares, window-shaking guns and gunfire. In his dreams he fled through burning orchards. Gilbert was an ambulance man again, but Charlie was driving the ambulance and somehow the war was mixed up with Father and Richard. In the dead hour of the night Gilbert shivered and woke, dreading something undefined. He took the candle by his bed and went to check on his nephews.

  Harry was asleep soundly, muttering and snoring under the covers. Richard’s door was half-closed and the electric light still on. Gilbert peered around the door. The papers Richard had been studying had fallen on the floor. Richard had never gone to bed but had fallen asleep uncomfortably in his chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his arms crossed. He looked much more tired than when he was awake, all the animation gone out of his face, shadows under his eyes and the beginnings of lines around his mouth. His head had fallen against the chair-back awkwardly so that his reading lamp was shining into his eyes.

  Gilbert hesitated by the door for a long time. Even though Richard was asleep, the light in his face must be uncomfortable. Gilbert thought of waking Richard, of getting him a blanket, of doing anything that would make him comfortable here. It was the light that he wanted to change most, it made Richard seem so helpless, and after a moment he entered Richard’s room and carefully turned out the light. He stood in the half-dark. But Richard would know he had been here. Was he interfering in Richard’s privacy? In panicked shyness, Gilbert swung the heavy brass lamp around so that the shade was at a better angle, then, shadowing it with his arm, turned the lamp on again. As if by accident Richard’s face was shaded from the light. Gilbert backed very quietly out of the room.

  He lit his own reading lamp and read Dante’s Purgatorio to settle his mind. Eventually Dante wrapped him round with sleepiness like grey cotton wool. He had half fallen asleep in his chair when there was a sudden rap at his door.

  “Gilbert.”

  “Richard? What is it?” He panicked for a moment because of having moved the lamp.

  “Will you come here, please?”

  He swung open his hall door. Richard was outside, as self- possessed as if he had been to bed and dressed again, but looking pale. Beside the little light they always kept burning, there was a strange red tinge to the darkness in the hall.

  “What?” Gilbert said sleepily.

  “Look toward the town.”

  He came out into the hall. Behind Richard he could see through the big new window on the staircase landing, all across the lake. The town buildings were silhouetted across the water in a red waving light that reached in streamers into the sky. “Oh, that cannot be,” Gilbert said, because whatever he had said and believed about the danger of fireworks, he did not really believe the fireworks would do anything more than frighten him. No more had he really believed that Richard would come back, except in his desires.

  As he watched, one of the silhouetted houses crumbled, just like a log in a fire—he knew the people there, one of the housemaids boarded with them. He rushed to the window and looked out, over the whole lake. In the terrible glow and sparkle of the fine, everything was dissolving in the light; there was no land, only water, smoke, and flame.


  “It’s coming toward the Clinic,” Richard said.

  A fire

  When Gilbert, Harry, and Richard got to the Clinic, the children were already streaming outside, into the fields, running toward the lake. Charlie came out of the house, still dressed in his bathrobe and pajamas, leaning on Perdita’s arm.

  By the lake three trees were burning. At this distance the flames made no sound, wavering quietly in their own heat like giant candles. Through baroque gauzes of smoke the station was aflame. The fire was coming fast, moving up the road in a fan past the Clinic fields. Gilbert stood openmouthed. Shockingly, Father’s railroad car was burning in the siding by the station, as if the fire did not know who Father was. Let it burn, Gilbert thought. And the house too—but to get to Father’s house, the fire would have to take the Clinic first.

  “Richard, I’ll stay with Charlie.”

  “Yes. Be careful.”

  “Be careful,” Gilbert said to both of his nephews, but it was Richard’s words he was repeating. Apprehension balled in a lump at his throat. Richard, be safe.

  Reisden and Harry plunged into the smoke. “We need men for the bucket brigade, men and women for the bucket brigade!” a lank voice droned in a background of shouts. A woman in an apron waved her arms and sobbed. “There are six horses in my barn,” an old man cried. “I need help with my horses.”

  Harry and Reisden led the horses out one by one, draping saddle blankets over the horses’ heads so the animals could not see the flames. Harry was trembling almost as much as the first horse he led out. “Don’t be afraid. They won’t rear,” Reisden said. “They won’t move unless you lead them.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. Reisden in his shirtsleeves, manhandling the horses out between burning timbers, thought calm at them. The horses stepped out quietly and stood under the trees in the dawn.

  They got out five; but as they tied the fifth’s lead rein, the barn swayed and leaned to one side. A great blast of heat puffed into their faces. A fireman shouted and waved them back. Some joint gave, burned through. Half the barn sagged and sighed inward; the fire reached up to explore the air half a story above where the roof had been, and finding nothing, runneled back over the still screaming and collapsing timbers, cracking and digging at the wood. Over that hideous noise came another scream, and out of the fire for a moment rose a living head, all fire, all mouth and burning mane. The cry seemed more noise than a horse could make. “Can’t someone shoot it?” a woman quavered, but the barn sank slowly down over it. The old man moved among the living horses, patting their heads; they huddled in a circle by him. Someone had rescued a handful of tackle, and he stooped and picked up a bright new bridle and held it awkwardly to his chest.

  The Children’s Clinic had an engine to itself. Channeled by a long hose from the lake, the water pumped through the smoke and played over the windows. On the long verandah, it blew over the potted plants; they lay with limp leaves and mud spilling from their pots. The nurses held the children back. Charlie Adair watched the fields burn below the Clinic. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, don’t let the Clinic burn . . . Mother of God, think of the children shut up in tenements in Boston. Hail Mary, full of grace, the kids need us. The fire crept up the fields toward the ramshackle white building, and the carved gilt eagle screamed on its cupola like a trapped phoenix. Charlie Adair watched the sparks land on the battered shingles of the Clinic, and char the shingles and the first planks of the porch; and then the wind changed, and the fire rose back up over the black fields, and finding nothing left to burn, guttered and fell harmlessly away. The children played in the puddles on the lawn, then demanded their breakfast.

  Perdita and Gilbert were in the bucket brigade, passing galvanized buckets until their arms were half pulled out of their sockets. They were pushed and led from one place to another as the fire grew, spread, and was beaten down again. Perdita held Gilbert’s elbow as they shuffled along in the crowd through the smoke.

  “Charlie’s safe—all the children—the Clinic is safe—no one hurt.”

  The fire took its toll among the farms north of town, then veered in a gathering wind out into the woods. The biggest battles were fought there. Reisden’s black automobile was commandeered since it was the fastest thing in town. Reisden drove through the morning woods down obscure logging roads, with Roy Daugherty in the passenger seat and on the floor a case of dynamite. “Sure hope I remember how to blast a firebreak,” Daugherty commented. Going around curves, the black car bucked and fought, slewing over the ruts. Daugherty clutched the dynamite. They stopped near the edge of the fire while Daugherty threw sticks of dynamite, apparently at random, into the edge of unburned woods. Trees crashed nearby, dirt rained around them. “Want to try one?” Daugherty asked him. Reisden threw and they ducked as branches flew over their heads. The firebreak was beginning to make sense: piled green trees, then a cleared area.

  “One could get to like this,” Reisden said.

  Anna Fen’s green-and-yellow barn burned, with all the Scenes from Shakespeare costumes inside it; but her house and all her animals were saved. Seven houses burned in all, eleven barns and other outbuildings, one wooden roof with an ornamental cupola where the owner kept pigeons. A fireman smashed shutters just in time. Back in town, in front of the house of a Mrs. Bartarin, Reisden saw the pigeons fly free, wheeling in the hot air. Mrs. Bartarin’s housemaid and her two daughters made lemonade inside the house; Mrs. Bartarin, smiling on the porch, ladled it out for the firemen. She was a fat woman with a sooty hospitable face. She handed Reisden lemonade in a cut-glass tumbler as elaborate as a vase.

  “Don’t you find it quiet in our little town, after the big city?”

  “Do you do this often?”

  She chuckled. “My husband just came by, he said the worst’s over and done with, thank Heaven!” She talked on comfortably. Her family had spent the summer at the lake for more than thirty years. (Reisden made a mental note: Emma Bartarin, here when the Knights died.) Her husband manufactured candy. “I used to be thin as a new moon before my Walt spoiled me.”

  Reisden watched a grey house down the street. Earlier the fire had blackened its outbuildings and now, from the wet, charred back of the house, smoke was creeping out again. As they watched, a window exploded outward with a great bang of smoke and they saw the fire inside.

  “Land, another one.” Mrs. Bartarin’s round face furrowed. “The Yeos’ house. They have a little one, Nellie, only three years old; I hope her parents are looking after her.”

  The firemen were nowhere to be seen. A woman with an older child in tow was standing in the front yard, looking around, calling out sharply. Mrs. Bartarin sucked in her breath.

  Two figures came into the front yard, a man and a girl. The older woman was protesting wildly, shaking her head, pointing at the burning house. The man ran inside. He was tall and muscular with blond hair. The girl stayed for a moment with the older woman, then— In the yard of the house was a pump; the girl backed up against it, pumped the handle quickly, and stood while the spout soaked her dress, then bent down to wet her long hair.

  Mrs. Bartarin’s glass crashed on the ground, lemonade and splinters of glass. “Is Nellie still in there?" she cried out.

  Perdita ran inside the house after Harry and the woman’s child.

  Nothing, nothing at all for about thirty seconds. The fire was taking the back of the house. They’ll both die, Reisden thought quite calmly; he was already running toward them. The screen door at the front opened but only Harry came out, coughing and retching from the smoke. He straightened up and looked around, kept looking around, expecting Perdita to be there.

  Air was being sucked in through the open door. The porch floor was smoldering. Harry made a rush at the door but the heat drove him off it, coughing and retching from the smoke.

  “Go get help!” Harry shouted at Reisden. “What are you doing?”

  “Get the bloody ladder.” There was one standing against an apple tree in the garden. Reisd
en hit at the square porch pillars with a shovel from the garden; pillars and porch and tin roof fell over the burning steps. The ruined door fell; in the short protection the porch gave, Reisden climbed over it and jumped down inside.