The Vanished Child Page 8

  When he was gone, she made her way up the stairs. Upstairs in the music room she brushed the music aside.

  What if this person were Richard Knight? Gilbert would be glad and Harry would hate him. How could she choose between Gilbert’s happiness and Harry’s?

  “No,” she said aloud. Harry was still Gilbert’s adopted son. It would be terrible for all of them. Harry would hurt too much, and so would Gilbert and herself and even the unknown Richard Knight.

  She automatically put the music back in its folder and the magnifying glass away in its drawer. Then she began playing from memory, the finale from Haydn’s Sonata in C Minor, with its anxious, passionate theme. She reached and held the skein of the music, half in each hand and the whole in her body until she and the music melded and there was no piano, no thoughts, no body, only passionate fear and hope, only the prayer that those she loved best would win through. And when it was done she sat back, feeling as if she had cried for an hour, with her resolution taken.

  If this was Richard Knight, the whole family must learn to live with him. And she must learn to love him as much as she loved Gilbert and Harry.

  Reisden and Perdita meet

  “You cannot possibly believe I am Richard,” Reisden said. Gilbert Knight grimaced at him, smiling through fear. Gilbert Knight, terrified, turned to Roy Daugherty and Bucky Pelham and insisted it was so.

  Bucky shouted at him. Roy said it wasn’t likely to be so. Reisden moved back and simply watched. Gilbert Knight had his face. Seeing one’s own face in a photograph was bad. Seeing it on a living man had made Reisden close to physically ill. “I want to leave here,” he said in an undertone to Daugherty.

  “He thinks you’re Richard.”

  “What the h—l am I supposed to do about that?”

  This was Richard, Gilbert repeated.

  “We’ll be glad to put the man up in a hotel,” Bucky said smoothly, “while—”

  “But you don’t understand, Mr. Pelham, he is home.”

  In the end there was nothing they could do. “We got reporters outside, which is something we ain’t counted on. You’re better in the house for now than in a hotel where they’ll get to you. Go with him,” Daugherty muttered to Reisden. “Keep telling him you ain’t Richard.”

  And so, finally, the Knights’ carriage was brought around to the side entrance and Gilbert Knight and Reisden were closed in it together, like relatives.

  It was by then the hour in the afternoon when everyone in Boston went home. Around the Common, Beacon Street was a snarl of traffic: closed cabs and horse-drawn buses and jitneys, bicycles darting by the legs of horses, and everywhere people on foot. The Knight carriage blinds were pulled down, closing out light and air.

  Reisden said nothing, not knowing what to say. They were both tall men and could not sit in the carriage without being crowded together; their legs got in the way of each other. Reisden moved his to the side. The black carriage jerked forward slowly. The heat was tremendous, and the carriage smelled of mildew and mold and of the old man. Reisden looked out at the traffic through the edge of the blind but saw only incoherent slivers, the red side of a delivery van, a horse’s rolling eye.He glanced at Gilbert Knight. Line of jaw, set of eyes: He recognized the fragments of the Knight face from Victor’s newspaper clippings of Jay French and the child Richard. What Gilbert had of his own was fear. Gilbert Knight’s face blanched as Reisden looked at him, Reisden’s look pinned him against the carriage wall, and Reisden turned away in a cold sweat, ill, as if he had seen himself afraid of himself.

  He was Alexander von Reisden. He held hard to what he knew but at the moment it did no good at all.

  “Richard, I think we’re here.”

  For a moment, of course, he did not know Gilbert Knight was talking to him. “I am not your Richard,” he spat back with a vehemence that surprised even him.

  “Are there…people outside?” Gilbert Knight twitched the shade up on the other side of the carriage.

  “There’s a reporter.” He looked again. “More than one.”

  Gilbert Knight looked at him blankly; Reisden swallowed bile and said, “You must deal with them yourself. I will not.”

  Gilbert slowly nodded, as if he had expected this too. I cannot look at him for one more moment, Reisden thought. “Have your driver take me to the back entrance.”

  Through the slit at the edge of the blind he caught sight of Gilbert Knight, being mobbed by reporters, running toward the door of the Knight house. He remembered the big grey front of the house from walking past it in the dawn. He put his head down, really afraid he was going to be ill.

  In the alley behind the avenue, the Knights’ back entrance was easy to find; the same granite blocks walled it off from the street and a heavy iron door was set into the wall. The door creaked closed behind Reisden. He shot the bolt and leaned against the door.

  For a moment he was alone.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the taste of the carriage to clear from his mouth. The air was cool against his skin, and fresh, and smelled of flowers. The back of the house faced west, so that late sunshine warmed its stones; there were no gargoyles, only ivy turning the stones to leaf, and on a trellis espaliered rosebushes climbed, still in bud. By the flagstones near the house, a few late daffodils still bloomed among striped tulips. Bleeding hearts arched by the wall among lilies of the valley, and snowball bushes bloomed below magnificent purple and white lilacs. The whole garden smelled of the fragrance of lilacs. In the center of the grass rose an apple tree, and its falling petals spilled white across the grass.

  By the apple tree a girl was standing.

  The spring light touched her white dress and the dark cloud of her hair. For the moment the girl was only a feeling, a sensation, indivisible, like a drawn breath, like being taken out of himself.

  “I waited for you,” she said.

  She was very young. Older than a child, perhaps sixteen, and growing into beauty; the lines and shadows of her delicate face would have made a woman beautiful; but she was not a woman yet, she had never thought of being one. He looked at her for as long as he might have breathed twice.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m Perdita,” she said.

  She did not really see him. The wind blew across the garden and the blossoms fell around her like bride’s-petals. Harry’s fiancée was almost blind, Daugherty had told Reisden. What Reisden had not expected, not at all, was that Harry’s fiancée and Bucky Pelham’s niece would be as absolutely innocent as spring.

  No. She was just a pretty girl, standing in a garden; a very young girl, a child.

  “Are you Richard?” she said.

  “No. Gilbert Knight thinks I am. That’s all.”

  She came across to him and took his hand shyly. He let her lead him over to a bench. She sat by him. There were petals on her hair, and she brushed one hand through it. He saw the glint of her engagement ring on her finger. The other hand she kept loosely in his. He kept his eyes on her: her beauty was a kind of sanity. She appeared to watch him too, but not precisely, as if she saw him through a dazzle, or while thinking intently about something. It was an odd sensation, being watched by someone who could not really see him: It made him feel alone, and alone with her.

  She didn’t say anything. He didn’t know how much Harry had told her, or how much of Harry’s situation she would appreciate for herself.

  “Look,” he said, groping for words. “I am sorry to intrude on you, for however short a time. Gilbert Knight has made a mistake. I could not possibly be Richard. I’m someone else, I am here by misapprehension, and he’s—I don’t know why he thinks so. It is not true.”

  She simply waited.

  “Do tell Harry this is all a mistake.”

  She nodded, a little color rising in her cheeks. They were still holding hands. She moved as if to take hers away, then didn’t.

  “When Harry came here,” she said after a while, “he and I walked here, in this garden. He was
eleven and I was eight. I told him that Uncle Gilbert loved him, and he knew it wasn’t true and so did I. Uncle Gilbert is very loving. But he wants Richard. Don’t mind Harry and me. If you are Richard you shouldn’t deny it or go away.”

  She stood up quickly in a whirl of skirts. “I’m going now.” And she ran toward the house, leaving him staring after her.

  “If we never talked about the past?”

  At the house, Gilbert took himself in hand. He sent the servants downstairs. Yes, Mr. Richard was here. No, they were not to talk to reporters. Mrs. Stelling must prepare her most elaborate meal and the big bedroom at the head of the stairs must be got ready.

  It was late, Gilbert realized suddenly. When Father had been alive they had eaten after the sun had set. Even when Gilbert was a little boy, they had been “genteel” enough, in his father’s eyes, to sit like gentlemen and ladies, eating in the dark. His sister had eaten the fruit out of the ornamental fruit bowl on the sideboard. That was what he remembered out of his childhood, being hungry while it got dark.

  Gilbert invited Richard inside, into the library. Gilbert moved around the library, lighting lamps to push away the dusk, forgetting for the moment that the servants were supposed to do it. He wondered if Richard would think it was an imposition, lighting without asking him. Without thinking, he also turned on the electric lights by the two paintings.

  “That is William Knight and that is Richard,” Richard said.

  Over the north mantel stood Father, larger than life size. Richard would remember him like this, an immense frowning presence, the Almighty in formal dress, dark against darkness. Over the south mantel, a little boy smiled with a dog in the sunlight of the rose garden. Gilbert thought, How I have lied to myself, to live with myself all these years. The child should never have been painted as if he had been happy.

  “Why did you say I am Richard?” Richard was standing by one of the two big leather chairs, his hand on the back, on the other side of it from Gilbert, keeping it between them.

  “Richard, sit down. You are at home.”

  “I’m not Richard. Do please answer.” At least Richard sat down. That was something, Gilbert thought.

  How could he say it? If you were not Richard you would say that you were glad I was your uncle. I would say that I was glad you were here.

  “You are like your father,” Gilbert said vaguely. “Like Tom.” It was the tiniest part of the truth.

  “That’s not enough.”

  “How much do you remember of Father, Richard?” he asked, hesitating between the words. “Of your grandfather?”

  “I don’t remember anything,” Richard said brusquely. “Look: Unless by any chance you have some reason to think positively I am Richard Knight, you cannot say that I am. If you have a reason, give it.”

  “Oh,” Gilbert said, trying to pull out of the horrible wholeness something that could be talked about by itself. “Oh, yes, I suppose, I have reasons.”

  “What?”

  It was as if he were still at the train station, when they had told him, so long ago, that Father had been murdered. The telegram was in one hand. The reporters asked him about Father’s death. He tried to look shocked, even be shocked. Why should he be shocked? Reasons. He could go and get Richard, Gilbert had thought then. They would not stay in Father’s house. He would take Richard back with him to the wagon. They would be peddlers together, or perhaps open up a real bookshop so that the boy could go to school in the winter. The boy would sit in the shop in the afternoons and read. On the top shelves of the bookshop, Gilbert would set apples to dry—wooden shelves are good for drying apples—and the bookshop would smell of apple-leather and of old paper, and Richard would read there in the winter afternoons, under the lamplight, and Richard would have been happy. That was the way it should have been. “Richard,” he said, “why did you come back?”

  “You are the only one who believes I am Richard.”

  “But here you are,” Gilbert said, puzzled.

  Richard leaned his head back on the chair and looked questioningly at Gilbert. Gilbert remembered just such a gesture of Tom’s: Oh, yes, he thought, having something to answer Richard with, but just too late.

  “As far as I’m concerned I am only someone who looks vaguely like you,” Richard said. He leaned forward and spoke with vehemence. "I do not remember anything about Richard. I don’t know you. You haven’t seen your nephew since he was four. What gives you the presumption to break into my life and call me him?”

  Presumption, Gilbert thought; well, he deserved worse. And then he really listened to what Richard was saying.

  “Do you mean,” Gilbert said, “when Mr. Pelham said you didn’t remember anything— Richard, you actually don’t remember? You don’t remember Father?”

  “William Knight? I don’t remember anything because I am not Richard.”

  Gilbert turned back to the painting for a moment. Father, he has forgot you. There was Father in the painting as Gilbert remembered him, with his wide wrinkled lips tightly closed, his hand around a stick, his eyes blazing. But Richard didn’t know him. Richard didn’t know anything. And there was Richard himself in the other painting. That was how he might think of himself: a little boy with a dog, smiling.

  Thank the kind God, Who had given Richard back to Gilbert. And more mercifully, had given him back without his memory.

  For the first time since the lawyers’ offices, Gilbert met Richard’s eyes. Richard had not come back happily or easily; he did not want to be here; he wanted to be told to go away. But he had come, and Gilbert was willing to do anything that was needed to keep him. “What would it be,” Gilbert said hesitatingly, “if we never talked about the past?”

  I will lie to you, Gilbert resolved, and get Charlie to lie to you. You will be happy.

  “I don’t mean that we must never talk about it, but it might be more pleasant for us—” pleasant! Gilbert thought—“to put off discussing the past. Not forever, you know. But a while. As long as you want. A few months. A few years. We could—you know—think about the future.”

  To his own ears, Gilbert’s words sounded strange. How often had he said anything, to anyone, about the future?

  “Someone killed Richard….”

  “You did something so he’d think you were Richard,” Harry said.

  Reisden leaned back in his chair. “I told him he was wrong.”

  Daugherty, Reisden, and Harry Boulding were conferring in Daugherty’s office. It was a measure of Bucky’s disgust with them that even Harry had been relegated here. The room was crowded with Knight family records and with its own furnishings, a desk of imposing bulk, cast down from a more imposing office, a fan because Daugherty’s office was hot, a lamp because it was dark. Daugherty’s one window looked out over a rear court.

  For three days Reisden had played the role of Reisden unwillingly being Richard Knight. He had watched himself being polite to Gilbert Knight, to Harry, to Perdita, the fiancée. Roles and acting, in the long-ago time when he had done such things, usually had released him and given him his emotions. But not now. He was numb as if he were dead.

  “You twisted him,” Harry said. “You did something!”

  Reisden looked him up and down. “I told him I was not Richard,” he said levelly. “I told him I have not a single memory of being Richard. He said, ‘Good.’ I want to know what I did as much as you do.”

  Harry turned and strode over to the other side of the room, his shoulders tight like a caged lion’s. Somewhere under that rage was the howl of a boy who was really not much loved. Harry had wanted Gilbert Knight to drop the idea of Richard; he had counted on it as much as Reisden himself had. Now Harry raged to keep his pride. Reisden understood, but he didn’t care much for Harry’s style.

  “He said you recognized him,” Harry said.

  “I didn’t bloody well recognize him, he looks like me and I wasn’t prepared for it. Take it as read that we didn’t want this to happen and we’re all terribly, terribly
embarrassed. How shall we get out of it? Daugherty, what does Bucky say?”

  “Bucky don’t know whether to spit nails or cry.”

  “Show him your birth certificate,” Harry said. “Prove you’re not Richard.”

  Reisden looked at Daugherty. “That won’t prove that Richard is dead.”

  Daugherty nodded. “We got ourselves a Richard that wa’n’t no Richard, and Gilbert took him like a fish takes a hook, ’scuse me Reisden. Now Bucky wants enough proof to shake even Gilbert. He wants Richard dead on Gilbert’s doormat and tomorrow morning wouldn’t be too soon. What do you think, Reisden? What do you want to do?”

  “I want to leave. But since we have the situation, we might do something useful with it.”

  “What?” Harry asked.

  Reisden lit a cigaret. Since I am not Richard, he thought, since I know that, there is nothing wrong with saying this. “Prove Richard is dead.”

  “Ain’t I been working on that these past eighteen years?”

  “Of course you have.” Reisden let the silence hang.

  Daugherty sighed. “Well, I ain’t found him yet, have I?”

  “He disappeared from the place up in New Hampshire— Matatonic. How thoroughly were you able to search there? Are there identifiable areas that were missed, for instance the cellars of houses? How thoroughly were you able to interview?”

  Daugherty shook his head. “Early on, when Richard first disappeared, we were looking for a live kid, not a body. I weren’t real experienced, either, and I was headin’ the search. I got the cellars of houses—but like I say, I was lookin’ for him live.”

  “How about the woods?”

  “A lot of woods up there. We done some searching. It ain’t easy.”