Captains and The Kings (81 page)

Not even a gardener was in view, and the sunlight lay blindingly on the windows of the mansion and all was brilliant silence and peace. Joseph tried to read, sitting near his daughter on the lawn. Her babbling, softer now, was the only sound in that radiance. Then Ann Marie was quiet. Joseph read. It was a confidential letter from Rory, in London, and though ambiguously worded it was important. His writing was small but black and concentrated, and if dispassionate to the casual eye Joseph could read between the lines. He almost forgot Ann Marie as he read.' Then he heard her say, softly and clearly, "Papa?": "Yes, dear," he answered, not taking his eyes from the letter. Then suddenly it came to him, piercingly, that there had been a strange new note in Ann Marie's voice, aware, quickened, understanding. The pages of the letter fell from his hands to the grass as he looked up. Ann Marie was gazing at him, not with the rosy foolish fondness of all these years, the childish fondness, but with mature and sorrowful love. She was transformed. The fat cheeks had flattened, the features sharpening instant by instant. The eyes grew large, widened, and Ann Marie* was there, imminent, within touching distance. She had returned, was inhabiting her body again. A middle-aged woman looked at him, completely conscious, completely in the world, completely adult. The soul had come forward from vast spaces into the present. The loose mouth had dried, and all its contours were womanly and intelligent, and it was trembling. But she was very pale. There was no color in her face now except for her eyes, those glistening and shimmering eyes which held Ann Marie. O God, Joseph thought. O my God. His body began to shake; sweat' broke out on his forehead. He leaned to his daughter to make sure, daring to hope, daring to accept this miracle. And she gazed back at him, faintly smiling, her eyes brightening moment by moment. "Papa?" she said again. , The Teddy Bear slipped from her arms, her thighs, and tumbled to the I grass, and she did not know it. Joseph pushed himself to his feet, shaking like a palsied old man. He wanted to shout, to cry for help, to run for assistance. But he could only stand, clutching the side of his chair. It was a light garden chair and could '. not bear his weight, standing, and it fell away from him with a clatter, and he staggered. He took a step to Ann Marie, his head roaring, his ears clanging as if with bells, and he did not look away from her for fear that she would vanish again. He fell on his knees beside her. She held up her hands to him and he took them and stared into her face. "Ann Marie," he said. "Ann Marie?" "Yes, Papa," she answered, and smiled at him. The sorrow was deep in her eyes. "Poor Papa," she said. She took one hand from him and smoothed his white hair, and she sighed. Her pallor was increasing. There was a fine shine of moisture all over her face, and she had begun to pant a little, rapidly, with a shallow indrawing of breath. A deep pulse was thrumming in that massive throat. "You've come back, my darling," said Joseph. His voice was dry and thick and choked. "I never went away. I just hid," said Ann Marie. Her face was like white wet stone in the blowing shadows of the leaves. "I just slept," she said, and her hand gently smoothed her father's hair. "But I always heard you, Papa." "You won't go away again?" said Joseph, and his heart was pounding so furiously that he felt faint. "You will stay this time, Ann Marie?" She was shaking her head slowly and ponderously, but she still held his hand, and hers was cold and slippery in his. "Courtney is here; he is calling me. I am going away with him, Papa. He's come for me. You mustn't grieve. I am so glad to go. I stayed just now because I wanted to say goodbye to you, and tell you how much I love you and how sorry I am that I've caused you so much pain. Forgive me, Papa. I couldn't help it, but forgive me." Then her face was brilliant with joy and love and ecstasy, and she looked beyond him and cried out, "Courtney! Courtney, I am coming!" Her eyes were like the sun, itself. She pulled her hand from her father's and held out her arms to something only she could see, and there was a murmurous sound of rapture in her throat. "Ann Marie!" Joseph cried, feeling madness about him, and terror and coldness. "Oh, Christ!" he almost screamed, and took his transfigured daughter in his arms and pulled her against his chest. There was a quaking in him, heightened terror, a furious denial, and the bright day grew shadowy about him. Ann Marie resisted feebly, then she was still, and she collapsed against him and her head fell to his shoulder. He could no longer hear her breathe. Then she sighed, and quivered all over her body, a long deep rippling of all her flesh, a final convulsion. She uttered one last sound, a fragile cry like a bird. Joseph knelt and held his daughter to him, heavy against him, heavy in his arms. He said, over and over, "Ann Marie, Ann Marie." But only the wind answered in the trees. He began to stroke the fallen head on his shoulder. Ann Marie Armagh was buried beside her brother under the pointed shadow of the tall marble obelisk, and the priest intoned, "I am the Resurrection and the Life-" The black grave yawned and the dully gleaming bronze casket was slowly lowered into it, sprinkled with holy water, and with earth. Bernadette sobbed beside her husband. Friends stood about them, mutely. They watched Joseph, so gray and still and stiff, but so indomitable and grim and they thought-and later said to each other-that he had shown no grief at all and had not tried to comfort his wife. Unfeeling, they said. Yet it had been rumored that he had "adored" his daughter. Ah, well, it was merciful that she had died at last. Just a burden on her poor mother, who had been a slave to her all these years. The girl had never been very intelligent, and the accident had taken away her last glimmer of intellect. The roses, white and red and pink, covered the raw' earth. Tombstones glowed palely all about them in the hot June sun. Leaf shadows ran over the grass. That night Bernadette sobbed to her husband, "Yes, there is a curse on this family! I've known it for years! Now we have no child left but Rory. My last child!" There was more fear in her than sorrow, superstitious fear. She said, "What will become of us if we lose Rory? I have such a feeling-" "Damn you, and your feelings," said Joseph, and left her. She forgave him, as usual, for only she knew how distraught he was,* and how he prowled the house and the gardens at night, and how often he went to the cemetery. A few days after Ann Marie had been buried Bernadette came to him in his rooms, carrying a newspaper in her hands, and her face, though swollen with weeping, was portentous and even a little excited. "It is in the newspapers!" she exclaimed. "Courtney Hennessey, my brother, died of a stroke on the very day Ann Marie-passed away! Here, Joseph, read it for yourself! His mother was notified by cable. He's been buried in the monastery burial grounds. It's all here." He took the paper in a hand that felt paralyzed and numb. He read, the lines blurring before his eyes. He said to himself, So, it was true. He came for her.,
He threw the paper from him and turned away. "I feel sorry for her,"I said Bernadette. "He was all she had. My brother. I suppose I should feel sad, and I will have Masses said for his soul, but I really can't feel very / much. Not very much. Maybe Courtney, and his mother, brought the ;* curse on us." Joseph was leaving the room. "Where?" she asked him, but he did not answer. She began to cry, for she knew where he was going.
Chapter 50
It had been a hot July day and it was nearly sunset, but the sky was a darkish copper against which the trees were turned a fierce unnatural green, and the hills had become sharp and tawny. Everything stood out in that ominous light with a hurtful vividness and clarity and appeared too close, too insistent, too detailed. Every blade of grass was distinct, painful, like an emerald razor that could cut the foot, and the colors of the flowers in their beds had a nightmare intensity. There was a profound hush over all things; nothing moved, not a leaf, not a bud. Even the fountains in the gardens had become noiseless, and there were no birds in sight. The countryman in Joseph knew that the absence of birds at this time of the day meant a storm. He went down the gravel path to the gate and then into the road, and down the road to Elizabeth's house. The copper of the sky had taken on a sheen, to the west, like brass. A hot breath, not a breeze or a gust, touched Joseph's set face, and it smelled of sulphur to him and burning dryness. He entered the gates of Elizabeth's house. He had not seen a carriage or a person on the road. All things had taken instinctive refuge. He heard, now, the explosion of gravel under his feet and it was like a shotgun being constantly discharged, the birdshot scattering. There were white seats and tables under the heavy dark oak near the house, and there Elizabeth sat in a white dress too bright in that sinister illumination. She had a white shawl over her shoulders. Her pale soft hair, so severely dressed, her face and her still body, might have been the figure of a seated statue. She did not stir when she saw him. She only watched him leave the path and come towards her. Then, when he was almost before her she rose and threw herself soundlessly into his arms and they clung together without a word, held each other as if they were dying. Elizabeth's cold face was pressed against the side of his neck. His chest crushed her breast, his arms were like iron on her thin flesh. She held him as desperately. She did not cry or moan or utter a sound. They did not even think of watchers, of curtains being held aside, of curious eyes looking. From her own window Bernadette could see those distant figures clenched together in an agony she was not permitted to share with her husband. She dropped the lace curtain and leaned her head against the side of the latticed window and cried silently, the slow and bitter drops falling one by one down her face without a sob. It was her child who had died, but Joseph had gone to a stranger for consolation, and was holding her as if they had become one motionless upright body, Elizabeth's white dress as still as stone. For the first time Bernadette knew that Joseph would never love her, and that he would most probably leave her. She let herself fall weightily on .her knees at the window and bent her head on the marble sill and gave herself to sorrow as if she were a widow and her husband would not return. The tears made dark little stains on the marble and Bernadette pressed her open and tormented mouth against the sill, and she felt the slow agonized breaking of her heart. She had never known such abandonment, such suffering, such humble anguish, in all her life. There was no hatred in her yet, only a deep groaning.
A wild wind suddenly rose, and there was a flash of lightning, then another, and a stunning smashing of thunder. The brazen light was swept away by the turbulence of black clouds. Lightning flashed again and again, and the trees shook their green manes at it in fury. Then the rain came, sheets of glittering silver in the glare from the sky, pounding, rushing, roaring. It shut off all visibility. Bernadette lay supine and dumb on the floor of her room near the window, staring blindly at the terrible radiance that flashed over her. Joseph and Elizabeth sat in the darkness and white fire that invaded the morning room. They sat side by side, their hands held together, staring at nothing, only half listening to the howling and raving of the storm, the wind, the thunder. They felt comfort in their nearness, and yet grief divided them so that they wanted to console each other and draw even closer. So Joseph told Elizabeth of Ann Marie's last words to him, and how she had cried out to Courtney and had appeared to "see" him, and that he had "come" for her. Elizabeth listened in silence, and now her eyes fixed themselves with a mournful absorption on Joseph's face, alternately hidden from her in darkness, and then revealed in lightning. "I am glad," she said at last in her controlled voice which trembled only slightly. "I believe-I want to believe-that my son came for your daughter. Is there any other explanation for Ann Marie's knowing, and, as you have told me, her almost joyful dying?" Joseph gently kissed her chilled cheek. He told her then of how his dying mother had apparently "seen" his dead father, who had come for her. Yet he knew surely that it had been only coincidence, the last desire of the dying. He did not tell Elizabeth this, but she sensed his resistance. "Don't you believe Courtney came for Ann Marie, Joseph?" she asked. "Don'tI you think your father came for your mother?" He did not want to add to her pain. He hesitated. "I have heard of clairvoyance," he said. "It might have been only that." "But what is clairvoyance?" she said. "It is a word, and we do have a habit of covering the inexplicable with a word and then thinking we have solved the matter by giving it a name. We have only added to the mystery. I believe-I believe- For the first time I truly believe. I have been only a ;i nominal Catholic, skeptical and aloof, smiling at reports of miracles and '? simple mysteries, and now I think I was a fool. A sophisticated silly fool, who was too stupid to marvel and wonder-and hope. You have given j me hope, Joseph, and please don't smile." "I am not smiling," he said, and she saw his face in another burst of lightning and she thought he looked very ill. He thought of the three graves in the family plot, Scan, Kevin, Ann Marie, and the black earth which had swallowed those he had loved and he knew that he could not believe that they were more than their dead flesh and that they were aware, still, and conscious in some unfathomable place beyond the stars. It was against sense, against reason. A live dog, King David had said, was better than a dead lion, for he had being, and Scan and Kevin and Ann Marie and Harry and Charles had no being any longer, and had ceased to exist. He thought of Harry, and all the vitality and zest that had been Harry's and he thought of Charles, educated and intellectual and urbane. All that had gone out in the blink of an eye and there was nothing left, and no knowledge in them that they had ever lived. A rational man had to accept that, and not reach for mist and myths out of the torture of his heart. But women were different. They had to be cosseted by comforting lies and made to believe the irrational. So Joseph said, "It may be true that they are together now, for Ann Marie had no way of knowing that Court- ney was dead-" For the very first time Joseph thought of the mother of his children, and she had lost two of them, and she had loved Kevin and had been inconsolable for months, and he could hear her crying in the night, possibly not for her daughter but for the misery of the years of her daughter. Damn, he thought. I never even considered her. She knew, I am sure, where I was going tonight. Bernadette is no fool. Perhaps she has known about Elizabeth and me all the time. She would have had to be an idiot not to know. He had felt compassion for Bernadette only on a very few occasions in their life together, a tight sour compassion. But now he felt a sick deep spasm of pity for his wife. He knew that she loved him, and really loved only him, and he revolted, as usual, against that love but now it was with pity also, even if that pity was tinged with his usual impatience. He had a horror of returning to that house and his wife, and confronting his sorrow again, his unbearable sorrow, in the silence of his rooms. He knew he would find himself listening for some sound from his daughter's suite, some childish babbling, some childish laughter, some cry or a call for him, as he had heard it for many years when he was home. But only the night would answer him. The rooms had been dismantled of their hospital equipment and utilitarian furniture, and had become, again, a pretty young woman's suite, to which Ann Marie would never return laughing from a ride on her horse, or singing at her little white piano, or running lightly over the polished wood. All at once the poor existing flesh which had been his daughter for years vanished from his memory, and it was the healthy shy Ann Marie he remembered now, with her soft little touches on his arm, her uplifted gentle face, her questioning dark amber eyes. At least that had returned to him like a ghost, but it did not relieve his grief. It made it worse, for it was as if Ann Marie, in full health and youth, had suddenly died and then had vanished, with her very voice in his ears and the very scent of her about him, and a last flash of her face.