The Vanished Child Page 9

Harry raised his head. “You mean you didn’t search everywhere?”

  “Son, there’s thousands of acres.”

  “You ought to search every one of them,” Harry said. “You could do it with Indian guides. They know the woods far better than the white man. This is important, Daugherty. This is about a lot of money. You don’t understand.”

  When Harry left a few minutes later, Reisden and Daugherty looked at each other.

  “‘They know the woods far better than the white man.’ Someday you’ll be working for him,” Reisden said.

  Daugherty sighed and looked down at his square-toed shoes, slightly out of date. “Trouble is, he’s going to talk to Bucky and Bucky’ll think it’s a good idea.”

  “Is it?”

  “Not the whole woods. You find bodies uphill of where they disappeared if they went on their own, downhill if somebody carried ’em. Or by a stream. Streams draw ’em.”

  Reisden thought. “Richard disappeared from a hotel. Who owns it?”

  “We do.” Daugherty cleared his throat. “Owners sold out six, seven years ago. We bought it for Charlie’s Children’s Clinic. The kids come out to the country, stay at the hotel, swim in the lake. We done a search there, but I’d like to do more, maybe take up some of the concrete in the basement. I actually worked out a whole plan.”

  “Tell me.”

  Daugherty opened a drawer of his desk, took out two sheets of paper, and gave them to Reisden, who scanned them.

  “This is good. Why not do it?”

  “Who’s goin’ to tell me to? Or pay for it? Gilbert just got his Richard.”

  Richard Knight was bones decomposing under a bush somewhere. And Richard was all he had. Richard was Reisden’s madness, working itself out.

  “Richard will,” Reisden said.

  “What say?”

  “Were I Richard, I would be annoyed at how comfortable my loss of memory is for other people. For some reason, Gilbert Knight is very relieved that Richard doesn’t remember anything. Gilbert has apparently asked Charlie Adair not to tell me anything. Bucky told me today that he has the same instructions.”

  “Bucky don’t know anything to tell, though. Leastways nothing he’s told me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Richard would be annoyed and inconveniently curious, if I were he. Look, Daugherty. For the time being, like it or not, we have got a Richard. Either I go away and try to ignore this, and get everlastingly disturbed by reporters—how shall I live it down, I wonder?—or I stay here and be useful. Is the Knights’ house in livable shape?”

  “Sure, we kept it up. Ain’t been used since.”

  “Very well, then. Like betrayed housemaids we shall take our sorrows to the country. We’ll live in the house where William Knight died, and from there, if we can, we shall find Richard. We mean to disgust Gilbert with the very idea of Richard. I cannot think of anything more effectively disgusting than rubbing his nose in Richard’s murder.

  “And do remember there’s another factor.” Reisden paused, shamelessly for effect. “Whoever killed Richard knows I’m not him. I wonder whether we can stir him up?”

  “Reisden, don’t joke about them things!”

  “Not a joke. Someone killed Richard. Now Richard wants to know why.”

  Reisden and Charlie Adair meet

  “Are you Richard after all?” Charlie Adair asked outright.

  “No, of course not.”

  By all appearances, the South End of Boston, on the wrong side of Massachusetts Avenue, had been built all at once about thirty years before, and not for the people who lived here now. Under their grime the brownstones were still elegant, but their façades were piebald with signs and fire escapes. The old doctor listened for a moment to a child crying from the Children’s Clinic and shook his head. From the first floor at the other end of the building came the sound of a piano and children’s voices singing. “We’re always open. We sing too, at night, and give the poor kids lessons. So many of them work during the day.” Adair opened the door into a classroom that was not being used. “We’ll talk here.”

  Children’s drawings, children’s little desks. Adair closed the door. He offered one of the half-sized chairs; Reisden smiled no and stood. Adair sat down as if he were out of breath or tired.

  “You know what this is about,” Reisden said. “Because of the resemblance, Bucky is obliged to find out whether I am Richard. He would like to be able to conclude the whole thing by finding Richard dead. So would I. I need information about the murders.”

  “You don’t think at all that you’re Richard?”

  “No. You did?”

  “You’re very much like him.” In the man’s kindly, ugly face, his eyes searched Reisden’s intently.

  “I’m not Richard.”

  The doctor stood up, wheezing a little, and stood in front of Reisden. “Who are you, then? What do you want?”

  “To prove that Richard is dead.”

  The old man’s brown eyes locked on Reisden’s and Adair looked without blinking straight into him, as if he could see Reisden’s brain and heart: as he had looked on the station platform, facing up to something, with a touch of fear.

  “Why do you want to prove that Richard is dead?” Adair asked.

  “To finish this.”

  “Is that truly what you want?”

  Yes. No. “Yes.” Around the stethoscope half-stuffed into the doctor’s jacket pocket was tangled a plain wooden rosary. “Pray for Gilbert to understand I am not Richard.”

  The doctor’s wide mouth compressed and he nodded, as if to himself, warily. “I do pray for him,” he said, half to himself, “and for his father, daily. And for myself. And, young man, I think I had better pray for you.”

  “Oh? And what should I do to be saved, Doctor?”

  “You should go away. You know that.”

  “You don’t want Richard to be found dead?”

  “Very much. But Mr. Daugherty, who’s a more capable man than he shows, has been looking for him since you were very young, Mr.—Dr. Reisden, you are a scientific doctor, aren’t you. I have no doubt you are a very intelligent young man, and I’m afraid I annoyed you by thinking you were Richard. Perhaps you will succeed where we’ve done nothing. But you don’t consider the effect on yourself.”

  “None, I think.”

  “Gilbert Knight is very wealthy.” Reisden smiled at that. “You don’t think you care for money any more than I do.” Charlie Adair gestured about him at the shabby classroom and hooked a hand around his worn lapel. “Ah, Dr. Reisden, but I want money all the time. I only have to go outside this door to want money. Gilbert’s been as generous to me as a man can be, all these years—Richard would have been as generous, I think. But I always want more, there are always more kids, and I’d be a mad and a desperate man if I didn’t have what Bert gives me now. Harry wants to manage the Knight Company into the twentieth century, and he wants money, too; and he’s a fine boy, but a little less fine because of the money. Is there anything you want, Dr. Reisden? Something you deeply believe in?”

  Money buys better chemistry. “Probably.” But Reisden had always been able to make the stock market pay for the lab, and money didn’t in the end buy knowledge. Money wouldn’t take the blue tinge away from Adair’s lips, raise the dead, or cure insanity. “I have money enough for myself. I want a part of Gilbert Knight’s to pay for finding Richard dead.”

  Screams interrupted them. Adair threw open the door of the room where they had been speaking and half-ran out into the hall.

  The Clinic hall was in bloody confusion. A policeman had brought in a child, a little boy, with his mother crying and screaming and the child’s angry neighbors crowding in behind. They all crowded into the emergency area. The little boy spilled like a sack onto the examination table, face yellow-white, eyes half-open. “—Dhrunken idiots—” the policeman was saying, “—the two of them going after each other with a knife, the D—1 take them, and the child between!” Charlie’s heart sank. Th
e child’s calf muscle was cut through to the bone, and, God save him, a jackknife was stuck near handle-deep in his chest just above the heart.

  “My baby! My baby!” the mother was crying. “Ah, Holy Mary, what shall I do!”

  The boy’s blood was pooling on the table. Someone wound a handkerchief around the leg above the cut and twisted it. Charlie looked around. It was the young man, Reisden, in his shirtsleeves.

  “The boy needs blood!” the policeman called. “Will some of you volunteer, now!”

  “I’ve got good blood!” a man called above the mother’s cries. Holy Mary, help the sufferers. Charlie nodded. “Yes, you first.” Under his fingertips the boy’s pulse was fading.

  “No,” Reisden told the policeman. “Use the mother or father. Blood types are inherited.”

  “A little woman like that?” the policeman asked, incredulous. “Get the boy’s uncle John from the saloon!”

  “Let the mother go first,” Charlie said. It didn’t matter. At that moment the child died. Charlie held the little, bony, dirty wrist and felt the pulse flutter and sink. No priest had come yet, and the child was old enough to have had his First Communion. He is confessing his sins, Charlie believed, and gave the child absolution, to go sinless before God. “May Our Lord Jesus Christ absolve you, and by His authority I absolve you …” Father Joseph arrived at last and administered Extreme Unction, Charlie offering to God as his own sin the pulse that had stopped long ago; then Charlie pulled out the knife and a great gush of blood followed it, slackening quickly. “The child is dead.” When the boy’s body had been removed, Charlie sat in the emergency room alone. His heart hurt. To pray the Joys of Mary would have been too cruel. He sat with his hands tangled in the sixth decade of his beads: Mary meets her Son for the first time since His death and Resurrection.

  “You were wrong.”

  The young man, Reisden, was standing at the door. His shirt was red halfway up his sleeves.

  “What would be right?” Charlie turned on him. “Can you tell me what would be right, Dr. Reisden?” Ashamed of his outburst, Charlie began to move the beads through his hands, but the mother’s cry was still in his ears, drowning out peace.

  “Look,” said Reisden, “stop that and listen. You don’t know Landsteiner’s work, do you? There are four different blood types. Give the wrong type of blood and you can kill the patient. Don’t your transfusion cases ever go into shock?”

  Yes, they did, and so did cases at every little hospital that took emergencies. “I know that there’s special new equipment to test blood, and special chemicals to use. But we’re not Children’s Hospital or the Brigham, Dr. Reisden, and I’m not a researcher like yourself. Which do we buy, a microscope or another bed in the ward? Do I buy a journal subscription or send a kid to the country?”

  “Ask for more,” the young man said, “and read more. Landsteiner published the basic paper five years ago. I’ll see you get information in English.”

  Dr. Reisden went to wash his hands. Dear God, help me to feel grateful to him, Charlie thought. I ought to be grateful to the man. In the past two years they had had transfusion shock four times, not many for a hospital in a poor area like this. Three of the children had died. Charlie had thought it a good record. Read more. The rosary beads seemed slick with Charlie’s shame.

  Dr. Reisden would think he should pray less in order to research more.

  The man was what he was, but he wasn’t Charlie’s type of person.

  Charlie went outside and sat on the Clinic stoop. The brownstone was cracking (but which was more important, repairs or soup?). Through the streets the children were still straggling home from their work, and Maureen O’Rourke pulled herself up the steps tiredly, greeting him as she passed, to pick up her three. Pregnant again, Charlie thought, and only twenty-two. Young Dr. Reisden would have answers for all of this. For the children working in the factories, too young to reach the levers, too tired to better themselves, falling asleep at night over their books in Charlie’s schoolroom. For the girls who got pregnant at fifteen and married at sixteen, sobbing through their confessions on Saturday afternoons; you could see the holes in their shoes as they knelt at prayer. For the men who drank because they had no work or because their fathers drank. All the answers young Dr. Reisden would have: scientific schools and Socialism, and research into the causes of poverty, and no Catholic superstitions.

  Maureen O’Rourke came down the steps again with her three little ones chattering around her and smiled at him as she passed, a loving smile. The Lord is with you, Maureen. Charlie’s heart lifted.

  But behind her, down the steps came Dr. Reisden, pale and blank-faced, getting away from the Clinic, uncomfortable with Charlie’s world. And with him, going from her volunteer work here as she did every Tuesday night, was Charlie’s beloved Perdita. They came down the steps together, Dr. Reisden nodding curtly to Charlie and Perdita not seeing him, and walked toward the comer, talking, until a cabman saw them and stopped and they both got in the cab together. Charlie stared after them, disturbed. Of course they would go together in a cab; Perdita was going to see Harry at Gilbert’s. But on the whole, Charlie would not much like her to be acquainted with Dr. Reisden.

  Gilbert’s fears; Harry and Perdita

  When Gilbert had said he would not talk about the past, he meant it.

  In all other matters, Gilbert deferred; he was not a confident man. He would not unfold his napkin at dinner without looking round to see if Reisden, Harry, and Perdita thought it was the correct time to unfold theirs. But for eighteen years he had believed, against everything, that Richard Knight was alive; and now that he had got his Richard halfway out of the underworld, Gilbert took a lesson from Lot and Orpheus. He would not look back.

  It was not only determination, it was fear. Reisden spoke to him directly about William; indirectly, about Richard’s parents, the house at Matatonic, the Knight family. But William Knight was completely out of bounds; Jay French not to be spoken of; and there were many smaller things as well—even Richard Knight’s boyhood reading was somehow suspect, odd for bookish Gilbert. Anything about Matatonic elicited a look from Gilbert like a horse’s look at a glue factory. What was he afraid of? Gilbert would talk about his childhood and his life traveling with a bookseller’s wagon, but almost anything after 1865 set him to run for cover. “I wonder, Richard, do you suppose Mrs. Stelling would be willing to make us a pie for this evening?” or “I have been reading a very interesting book about clouds.”

  Why was Gilbert Knight so afraid?

  Behind Gilbert’s stiff tentative talk was fear. He was afraid of canned goods, electricity, and bicycles. He liked baseball games—Harry played baseball—but Gilbert had a fund of stories about catchers whose skulls had been crushed by bats, people in the stands killed by home runs. Ballpark lemonade caused cholera, Gilbert told Reisden and Perdita. And hot dogs—Gilbert had read The Jungle—hot dogs were unspeakable. Gilbert knew that, except for the sausage Mrs. Stelling made in the kitchen downstairs, all ground meat contained mice and fingers. He was afraid of traffic, excessively hot days, the subway, heavy rain, and sitting down in public places.

  Sweetly, he was occasionally quite courageous. Daugherty told Reisden the wonderful story of Gilbert and the thief. One night some years ago, Gilbert had gone downstairs for a glass of milk and found a thief in the library. Thief says Grrr, sit down, don’t you know I’m a dangerous man. Gilbert says Oh dear, and sits down. Gilbert notices the thief’s feet are wet, a common cause of cold, and suggests he remove his shoes. Thief goes through the room, trying to ignore Gilbert, looking for something to steal. Gilbert begins pointing out things. “Those vases are very ugly but I think they’re worth quite a bit.” Gilbert wrestles with his conscience and finally, unhappily, tells the thief that his collection of early North Italian bookbindings is the most valuable thing in the room. Thief begins to swear. “Where am I going to fence those, huh? Don’t you got any sense?” Thief goes off with the ugly vases and some
silver. Gilbert, safe with his unfenceable bookbindings, goes sweetly to sleep. Only the next morning does he send the butler, Mr. Phillips, to call on the police.

  Gilbert was afraid of cats, who smothered even grown persons by lying on their faces as they slept. Gilbert was afraid of little dogs, big dogs, squirrels, comets, escalators, drunkards, and drains. Gilbert knew that slates fell from roofs and decapitated innocent people standing on the sidewalk. According to Gilbert, fearful things might happen, shortly could happen, were known frequently to happen in just the situation that Harry or Reisden or Perdita was now in.

  “Parts of Dickens,” he told Reisden, “parts of Dickens make me tremble.”

  Gilbert was afraid of the French Revolution.

  But who would be hurt now because William Knight had been killed eighteen years ago? Did Gilbert simply fear to look back at it? Would talking about it make it happen again?

  Those who are determined not to repeat the past, ignore it.

  When Gilbert had thought Richard knew about the murder, Gilbert had been terrified. Reisden remembered his look, like an animal seeing the slaughterhouse and smelling blood. But when Richard had no memories? Gilbert was only his ordinary self, perpetually anxious as that self was.

  Why doesn’t he simply believe I’m not Richard, Reisden thought. It would be so much less trouble. But at that game he was no better than Gilbert. He should have believed it himself.