The Vanished Child Read online

  “Neither one of us, I think, wanted to meet at the Harvard Club,” said a third voice.

  All Harry saw at first was a shadow. The man who had spoken had to duck as he came down the stairs; he was an inch or two taller than Harry. His voice was deeper than Harry’s. Then he came into the light, and Harry tensed all his muscles and gauged the man’s size and strength as if he’d have to fight him.

  On the stairs of the house on Commonwealth Avenue hung portraits of all of William’s sons: William, Alphonsus, John, Clement, Thomas Robert. Up and down the stairs every day, Harry passed a long row of Knight men, dark-haired, long-nosed, with the same build of eyebrow and eyelid and the same half-colorless grey eyes. Looking at the Baron von Reisden, Harry was overcome with indignation, as if the man’s very look was a trick, a falsity; he looked as if he should have been painted.

  “You’re Harry.” The Austrian baron was thin, dressed in a dark suit and coat, not in fashion for the summer; but he had the look, absurdly, of a man who was used to being in charge.

  Not in charge here, Harry thought. He could play cool too. “Daugherty here says you’re a gentleman. A gentleman wouldn’t do what you’re doing.”

  “Anecdotal evidence suggests there are exceptions. Would you like to play games or shall we talk?”

  “What?” Harry smiled. The man even spoke like a portrait.

  “I don’t like this. I assume you don’t either. Let’s not waste time proving it.” The man went to the counter of the shooting gallery and casually took a gun out of his pocket. Harry blinked. “Am I really supposed to show you I can use this?” Reisden asked Daugherty.

  “Bucky’s nervous. He keeps thinking about Jay French.”

  “Jay French, at least, knows I’m not Richard Knight.” The Austrian took out a box from his other coat pocket, opened it, and began fitting bullets into the gun with quick, economical movements. “Daugherty, could you find fresh targets?” Daugherty lumbered up the stairs. Harry was left alone with Reisden.

  “I’m Alexander Reisden,” the man said, turning around with the gun still in his hands. “I am going to briefly and unsuccessfully impersonate your cousin. I thought you should meet me first. ”

  “I'm Harry Boulding,” Harry said, but nothing more.

  “You are Gilbert Knight’s adopted son?”

  “So he says. I can’t say he does much about it.” Harry felt he was complaining. Not to this man.

  “Yes, he’s being foolish.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Harry moved away from him. The Austrian opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. Shut up, you paint on canvas.

  Daugherty came clattering downstairs with fresh targets. “Thank you,” Reisden said, and Daugherty reeled in the targets on their wires without being asked.

  “Gilbert Knight and Richard didn’t know each other well,” Reisden said after a moment. “Gilbert is unlikely to be certain of anything, except, I hope, that he doesn’t want Richard.”

  “He won’t think you’re Richard.”

  Daugherty came back behind the counter. “You ready, Reisden?”

  Reisden casually stood behind the counter, bracing his gun hand with the other, and fired off six shots, steadily as a clock ticks. Daugherty looked at the target solemnly, counted the holes near the center, unclipped it, and folded and pocketed it. “So’s to tell Bucky he don’t need to worry,” he explained.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Harry asked in spite of himself.

  Reisden looked at him, uninterested. “Targets don’t hurt. That makes them easy.”

  Bastard.

  When the two other men had gone, Harry went upstairs.

  “Give me a gun,” he said.

  The targets were farther away than they looked, but Harry blazed away at them, round after round, trying to shoot a hole in something he didn’t want to give a name to.

  Gilbert meets Richard

  Richard, Richard . . .

  All morning Gilbert Knight’s anonymous old carriage drove around and around the Common; and Gilbert Knight sat inside with his fear. Fear drew the blinds for him and he trembled in the darkness.

  The last time he had been so frightened was long ago, that August, before Bucky Pelham’s telegram had come. He had known that something was about to happen and had taken his broken-springed book wagon out into the country, selling books among the farms, to escape knowing too soon. He remembered one afternoon he had stopped at a farm. Apple trees in an orchard, apples falling one by one, thudding like a fist swatting flies, and the sweet sweet smell of apples. He had sold a copy of Moby Dick to the orchardman’s wife, secondhand, but a good copy, because she said she wanted to read the book he had been reading; he looked so scared, she said, it must be a first-rate haunt. And then he had come back from the apples to time and the telegram waiting for him, and the news that was so much worse than anything he had imagined.

  Oh, Richard.

  Gilbert sat inside, not thinking, just hearing sounds inside his head, clop clop and the squeal of the springs, the hum and creak of the rubber tires. The heat came through the ceiling of the old carriage and let out smells, leather and dust and mildew, because he never used the carriage although it was supposed to be always prepared; and with the shades down it grew hotter and hotter, until there was nothing in his head but rattle and heat.

  Richard, what will you think of me?

  After Roy Daugherty had told him, Gilbert had tried to find Richard’s photograph. The painted picture hadn’t been good enough; he wanted to find his own familiar record of the light that had shone on Richard’s real face, to see if he might find some forgiveness there. But the picture in its silver frame had gone. He had wanted to see the little boy in the garden at Matatonic, with the dog and the scraped knees, the little boy smiling. For once Richard had been happy. See, Gilbert could have said, you were happy. But the picture was gone.

  What could he say to redeem himself? Do you remember I sent you a Barlow knife at Christmas when you were six? Gilbert had been allowed to give only a handful of presents, mostly books from his stock. I was your uncle. I loved you. Love hadn’t been enough. Gilbert knew what Richard would say to him. When you should have helped me, you were afraid.

  “Now, if this ain’t Richard—” Roy Daugherty had said.

  Gilbert was shocked at his feeling of relief when he thought this man might not be Richard. Then it would still be all right. No one would confront him. Then, Gilbert thought, perhaps he could believe Richard was dead. He would give Harry all he deserved. He would declare Richard dead right away, and then no one would know what Richard had known.

  Gilbert Knight had known he was a coward since the summer he was seventeen. It was the first year of the war. His much older half-brother, who had just got his commission, was showing off his new uniforms for the family. When all the rest of them went downstairs, Gilbert stayed behind, turning over in his hands his brother’s new service revolver. He sighted down it; he hefted the weight of it in his hands; and unwillingly, with the gun between his loose fingers, he began to understand what the war was. Camaraderie and uniforms he did not understand; he was a rather shy boy, he wore glasses, he would have been one of those soldiers whose swords drag on the ground. All of war was in those long-bodied bullets he loaded into his brother’s gun. “May I shoot your revolver?” he asked, and took it out into the waste ground behind the house and fired it at a half-ripe pumpkin, which exploded. He brought the gun back silently and laid it down. When his classmates went off to war in cockades and bright ribbons, he enrolled himself in the Ambulance Corps. His brothers died valiantly. Gilbert went through the war uncelebrated, unharmed, and afraid. His father never spoke to him again.

  For his whole life Gilbert would grope among better and more decisive men. With women and in business he held back, playing follow-the-leader through life like a shy boy on the edge of a playground. When he was thirty-four Gilbert spent a summer in Boston. Tom, his tall young half-brother,
was nineteen. Once in a dark conservatory at a dance, Gilbert saw Tom with beautiful Sophie Hilary from New York. Desperate whispers and rustles of clothing, hands and kisses where no book had told Gilbert hands and kisses might be. The mystery of love was verified for Gilbert in an instant, and he blinked and turned away from their privacy, but felt blessed. Tom and Sophie’s wedding had to be hurried. On the day of her bridal Sophie was pale, awkward, triumphant, rounding at bosom and waist. Gilbert sat among the row of disapproving faces in the family pew, among sick maidenly Isabella and the servants, old dry voices snickering and whispering. But, Gilbert thought, Tom and Sophie are happy. Through Sophie’s veil, under the white virgin’s silk, Gilbert saw Sophie’s lush breasts; he was suddenly young with desire, as if he had sown and reaped too. How young they were at the wedding party afterward; girls of eighteen and seventeen, talking in high voices, laughing and crying; beardless boys, barely shaving, mouths mustached with a few brave hairs; careful of bright dresses, new shoes, flowers. Oh, I have missed this, Gilbert thought; but he wandered through the party as though he too had a new suit to wear, a hand to hold.

  Father had cursed Sophie and her baby to come, and stayed away; and when Tom and Sophie had died, Father had taken the child.

  Richard, how could I leave you?

  But shall I wish you dead, so no one will know I wronged you?

  The bells of the Arlington Street Church tolled the three-quarter-hour after one, and his carriage turned and crawled up Tremont Street and then by Boylston toward Park again, and the gilded hands of the Park Street Church clock said one-fifty-four, so soon, so soon, all around the tall square tower. He knocked with his cane against the carriage roof. The carriage turned up toward Beacon Hill, past the State House high and serene, and down again, to Bucky Pelham’s office on Beacon Street.

  The stairs were steep and dim, the door at the top was closed. He took the doorknob in his hand and stood without going in.

  It was time to give up all his hope of Richard. He would not leave this office today without signing the papers.

  Goodbye, Richard. Goodbye, brother Tom.

  He turned the doorknob and let the door open.

  Chairs, sun, a quiet place. No lawyers, no reporters. No one but a thin, dark-haired man he did not recognize, standing by the window looking out. Gilbert closed the door with a little click, and when he turned back the young man was facing him.

  It was then, only then, he saw.

  The young man’s grey eyes widened and he moved back and stood with his back to the window, head high, palms pressed against the windowsill. His eyes looked through Gilbert, the whites were blazing, in anger or disdain or simply denial.

  Richard should have been a happy little boy with scraped knees, holding his puppy, smiling. In a good world there would have been still a little boy to love. What does one want but someone to love, someone to do for, to accept what one has to give? Easy with a painted picture, easy with a child. The man stood unmoving, so that there was an inflexible distance between them; and what to call that distance Gilbert didn’t know, but he knew where it had come from.

  The young man raised his head, looked at Gilbert straight. “No. No,” he said. It was insistence; it was a warning.

  There would be no little boy smiling. Why would Richard want to come back, or to remember, or least of all to be happy? That was the recognition, and Gilbert met the look in those cold wide eyes. So little had happened to Gilbert. But when it did, he knew. At last Gilbert had been given something to do, and he did it.

  “Yes,” Gilbert said.

  Perdita decides what to do

  “Well, Miss, if Mr. Gilbert hasn’t even told you—” Lucy the housemaid sniffed disconsolately.

  That afternoon Perdita Halley was alone in the music room at the Knights’ house, practicing. It was unusual for her to be quite so alone. The music room was just across the hall from Uncle Gilbert’s library. He did bookbinding, and usually, while she did scales, she could smell leather and neat’s-foot oil and three different kinds of glue. Not today. “He went out this morning, Miss, all mysterious,” Lucy continued. “And he was upset, but no telling why.”

  Any change in routine was upsetting to the young housemaids and the middle-aged housekeeper and butler. They liked things as quiet as a woods-pond. Even battle-ax Mrs. Martin, the housekeeper, was already beginning to work up a panic for the wedding, which wouldn’t be until Christmas. “Don’t worry, Lucy, we shall find out about it soon.”

  “I hope so, Miss. He wore the wrong tie with his suit today, and that isn’t like him at all.”

  Perdita was working today on a new piece of music. One hand held the magnifying glass over two inches of notes, the other hand learned the fingering. She worked her way through the music two inches at a time, trying not to think too hard of how she would make rhythm and sense of them until she had the notes down. Slow measure in the right hand, a springy beat like a jump rope on the top of the octave line. Left hand, waltz until measure 5. Right hand changing articulations in measures 9-10 and in 11-12. The right-hand part was all thumb and fifth-finger substitutions, enough to give you palm cramps just thinking about it. Perdita practiced slowly, relaxing her hands as she learned, building up toward the right tempo. She peeked forward to the second section, looked at the first measures, a formidable black blur on the page, and sighed. She had to learn that fingering today. And all this morning she had had fittings for her wedding clothes, which cut dreadfully into practice time.

  “Miss? Miss, something awful!”

  Lucy burst open the door without knocking. “Oh, Miss! Miss Emma Blackstone’s maid has just come from next door and says Miss Emma heard they’ve found the little boy. Master Richard. And he’s alive!”

  “Lucy, what?” Miss Emma went everywhere and heard everything, but only half of it was true. “I think we would hear first.”

  “Master Harry wants to see you downstairs.”

  She jumped up off the piano bench and found her way past Lucy’s black-and-white bulk into the hall. In the dark she was immediately blind as a bat; she felt her way down the familiar stairs.

  “Miss Emma says he was locked up in a madhouse,” Lucy whispered behind her, “and when they found him all he could say was ‘Blood and horror! Blood and horror!’ His hair’s completely white and he doesn’t remember so much as his own name.”

  “Oh, Lucy, hush. That is nonsense. What is that sound?” There was a confused shouting from outside the door.

  “People outside, Miss—” Downstairs the door burst open, spilling light in a white cloud into the hall. Lucy screamed as if she had been bit by snakes, but with an undertone of triumph. “Oh, Miss, reporters!” Lucy rushed forward and Perdita held her back.

  “You can’t come in!” Mr. Phillips, the old butler, was actually yelling. Mrs. Martin was screaming behind him, “We will call the police!” The light wavered, wide then narrow, as if Mr. Phillips were trying to close the door against resistance.

  “Miss Perdita, you stay away from them,” Mrs. Martin said. A camera flash went off in her face; she squeezed her eyes tight.

  At least she had talked to reporters once or twice after recitals. “Mr. Phillips, don’t you let any of them get inside.” She squared her shoulders and eased open the door.

  “Miss Halley! What is Harry Boulding going to do?”

  “Is the wedding off?”

  She raised her voice as high as she could make it. “We don’t know anything, this is a surprise to us, and your cameras are hurting my eyes. You must wait outside. Lucy will serve you tea. As soon as we know something, we will tell you at once.” She hoped the food would distract them. “But you must wait outside or we must call the police.”

  Mr. Phillips put his shoulder to the door and the hall went completely black, suddenly quiet.

  “Journalists!” Mr. Phillips said under his breath. “Disgraceful.”

  “Tea, Miss?” quavered Lucy.

  “Yes, and sandwiches and whatever e
lse we have. Tell Mrs. Stelling, and take Mr. Phillips with you.”

  “And if you talk to anyone, girl, you’ll have no reference from me,” Mrs. Martin said.

  “Where is Harry?”

  She found him in the dining room. The blinds were closed; she closed the door too. He must have heard the reporters in the hall and for a moment she wondered that he hadn’t come to throw them out. By that she knew how hurt he was.

  “You didn’t have to give them food!” he whispered at her angrily, then stopped himself. “Pet, I don’t mean it. You know I’m not angry at you.”

  “Oh, Harry!” She sat down beside him and put her arms around him.

  “I'm going out of this house and I’ll never come here again.”

  “Shhh, Harry.”

  “This man isn’t Richard. I’ve met him, Pet. He doesn’t even pretend to be Richard. My ex-uncle doesn’t know anything about him—not anything—” He walked up and down the room, then sat down again beside her. “I'm not going to suffer like this.”

  She held his hand and he snatched it away. He pounded the table with his fist as if he wanted to splinter the heavy mahogany.

  “Come with me, Pet. We’ll get married at City Hall today, then we’ll move to another city. Come on.” He stood up and tugged at her.

  “Harry, it’s a mistake, it will all come out right. You’ll see.”

  He fell down to his knees and buried his face in her lap. “It won’t come out right. Nothing in my life has ever been fair. Love me, Pet. Love me forever the way I love you.”

  Outside in the hall there were loud voices again, then a slam. “I won’t stay here,” Harry said.

  “Yes, go over to Joe’s house, stay with him.”

  “I wonder if Joe’s still my friend when something like this happens. The only person I don’t wonder about is you. I’m getting married to you if it’s the last thing I do in my life. I'm going over to Bucky’s,” said Harry grimly. “I’ve got a few things to say to him. You stay here. If Gilbert comes back, tell him he’s never seeing me again.”