Due Preparations for the Plague (9 page)

“Air tickets are easy to forge. She’s just a name on the Web. Some people get high on that. They make up names, they cruise websites—”

“I know that. That’s why I want to go to Paris. I want to meet her, check her ID, check her birth certificate, date of birth, check her driver’s—”

“I bet this is about the will,” Lowell says. “My father’s will. Fishy that she suddenly pops up now, the way scores of women claimed to be Anastasia, the czar’s daughter—”

“Maybe. But she made contact in August, before your father died.”

“Maybe she knew what was coming,” Lowell says.

They stare at each other.

“I’ll tell you something else that’s creepy,” Samantha whispers. “My mother was on that flight, right? My mother’s sister was living in Paris and sharing an apartment with a woman named Françoise. I know, I know, it’s a common name. It gives me a strange little buzz, just the same. That’s another reason why I want to go to Paris. My aunt has a photograph of
her
Françoise.”

“Thirteen years,” Lowell says. “People change.”

“We can ask Françoise who her roommate was in ’87. If she names my aunt—”

“It might mean she’s as good at ferreting out information as you are. Professional con men—or con women—are brilliant at that sort of thing.”

“I know. I know that might be all it means. On the other hand, it might mean that your half-sister shared an apartment with my aunt.”

“And what would that prove?” Lowell asks.

“I don’t know what it would prove, but it would be very creepy.”

“Have you ever heard of Sirocco?” Lowell whispers, leaning close.

“Yes.” Samantha watches him intently. “I’ve met him in declassified documents. Not too often. Probably only when the declassifying inspector missed blacking him out.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He had something to do with the hijacking. I think he was the chief hatchet man. The ‘rogue agent’, as they say.”

“The foreigner who actually does the dirty work,” Lowell says.

“I think so.”

“Saudi?” Lowell says.

“I think so. Or possibly Egyptian. So you’ve been filing Freedom of Information applications too?”

“No.” Lowell reaches for the bag on the floor between his feet and lifts it back onto his lap. He keeps the soft handles twisted around his wrist. “I have a different source of … I happened on inside information accidentally.”

Samantha leans across the table toward him. “What about Salamander?” she asks. “Do you have anything on him?”

“He’s American.”

“I know he is. He’s the one I want to find. He’s the prime mover.”

“I think my father knew who Salamander was,” Lowell says. “I think he knew who Sirocco was. I think my father died because he knew.”

“What is in your bag?”

“Better you don’t know.”

“Your father,” Samantha says carefully, “that August and September. Is there anything you can remember that might shed light …?”

Lowell groans. “If you knew how much I’ve tried to forget.”

And then he starts to explain the too much that he remembers too well.

Lowell remembers bad dreams and wet sheets and his mother there, holding him. He remembers giants with eyes of green fire. He remembers clanking monsters made of cans, like the Tin Man grown huge as an elephant. The giants shook his father like a toy, they sliced him in two. “Daddy, Daddy!” Lowell would scream, and his mother was always there, holding him, rocking him, crooning.

“Daddy’s away, baby,” she would murmur. “But Mommy’s here.”

He remembers the sweet smell of her skin and her hair, the smell of talcum and of Parisian perfume. She would turn on the light and read a story, and then she would sing in the dark.

He remembers two birthday parties when his father was home: his fourth birthday and his seventh. He remembers the three happy faces in the glow of the candles on his cake. He remembers the bedtime stories his father told. He remembers Odysseus tied to the mast, and Theseus and the Minotaur, and Atalanta and the golden apples, and Leda and the swan. He remembers his first day at school: how lonely his mother looked, standing there. He can feel it still, like an oceanic grief that drowns, that swamps, that pulls at him, that takes his air, the way her sad smile washes over him, and he vows he will devote each day of his life to making her happy. It is the thing he most passionately desires. He remembers the day she sat at the kitchen table, not moving, and said, “Are you ready for school, Lowell? Your lunch box is in the fridge,” and he remembers how the flatness of her voice frightened him because it was late afternoon and he had stayed to play baseball after class. He remembers how he had gone outside and searched for the most perfect flower in the garden to give to her. He remembers how he prayed that the flower would make her smile, and he remembers how she looked at it vaguely—it was a white rose, heavily fragrant—as though not knowing what it was, and how she then frowned and looked at it steadily and how her eyes filled with tears. He remembers how she pressed her lips together and how she could not speak for some time, and how she then said to him, “Dearest Lowell, what a gift you are. What a gift. You are all I have,” and how he had the sensation of being sucked into a funnel that went down into the center of the earth where blackness and nothingness were.

Lowell remembers his father saying, “Your mother doesn’t have the resources, Lowell, to cope with my frequent absences,” his father saying it gravely and kindly, “or with the requirements of my position, the requirements of silence and of secrecy, which demand a special kind …” his father explaining, “I married too young the first time, Lowell, and then I was lonely when my first wife died, and I made another mistake, but you’ve made up for that. I’m counting on you. I’m counting on you to look after your mother, you know what I mean.

“I’m counting on you,” his father said, “to be strong like Achilles, and to carry on the Hawthorne tradition at school. It’s all the more important, Lowell …

“Your mother,” his father said, he remembers his father saying, “is in a state of low-grade nervous depression, Lowell. It’s not her fault, not really, but I’m counting on you to keep an eye …” He remembers all the textures of sadness, his father’s sadness, his mother’s, and his own, and he remembers the absences, the loneliness, the sound of his mother crying at night. Lowell remembers, remembers, his head in his hands. Lowell remembers too much, and the silences between his revelations grow long.

“Was she?” Samantha prompts at last. “Your mother? Was she clinically depressed?”

“I suppose so. I suppose I was too, when I think back. It’s not that she wasn’t functional. She did all the right things. Whenever my father was home, there were dinner parties and receptions and soirées and little chamber music groups. It was all a glittering whirl, and my mother hosted all that. But there was …” Everywhere he turned, their lives were overcast with sadness and it almost choked Lowell, it made the house bleak. “There was always this fog,” he says. “I couldn’t shift it.” It exhausted him.

And then one day, suddenly, he was angry instead of sad, and that was easier. That was so much easier. He went off to boarding school, and he dreaded coming home. He would accept invitations to other homes, he’d even stay at school for long weekends. It was so much simpler not being home. Not having to note his father’s absence or see his mother’s sad smile.

And then, one spring break, he ran out of options and he had to go home. His father was there for once and his parents hosted a reception for a string quartet …

Lowell
felt
the chemistry, he felt it the first time his mother and Avi Levinstein looked at each other, and it broke his heart. All his life’s energy, all his little-boy prayers, all his wishbone wishes at Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, had gone into trying to shift that black cloud of sadness from her shoulders, and Avi Levinstein walked in and did it by looking at her.

“I hated Levinstein. And I could never forgive my mother.”

The more alive, the more beautiful she became, the more angry Lowell grew. She told him she was leaving in May. “Lowell,” she said, radiant, “I’m in love.”

“You want a gold star for that?” he said rudely. He had just turned sixteen.

“Oh Lowell,” she said. “Please be happy for me,” and he remembers that she told him that his father was a good man, a dear man, such a dear man, and how she did not want to hurt his father or make him unhappy, but Lowell surely knew, he surely understood that between them, between his father and his mother, things had not been working out very well, Lowell must have known that. And he remembers that she told him that
they
—that his mother and Levinstein—were going to Paris for a while, and that his father was filing for divorce and she would not contest, she would consent to being the guilty party, she would grant his father that, but that after the divorce she and Avi Levinstein would return to New York and would get married. “But for the time being, we will stay in Paris,” he remembers her saying with wings on her voice. “Will you come and visit us in Paris? Please, Lowell. It is something I would like very much.”

“I turned around and walked away,” Lowell says. “I refused to kiss her goodbye. That was in May. May 1987. I never saw her again.”

Four months later, she called from Paris to say they were flying home. The fall term had just begun and Lowell took the call in the hallway of his boarding-school dorm, a bleak brown tunnel with no light at either end. His mother sounded rapturously happy. She gave Lowell her flight number and date of arrival, and Lowell hung up on her. He dialed Washington and left a message on his father’s answering machine. He said only, “They are coming back.”

Two days later, he took another call in the same hallway. “How are you, Lowell?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“I have handled my life very badly,” his father said.

Lowell said awkwardly, “No, you haven’t, Dad.”

“Don’t make my mistakes, Lowell,” his father said. He sounded agitated. Then he said, “Would you do something for me?”

“Sure,” Lowell said.

“It’s very important,” his father said. “It’s very,
very
important, Lowell.”

“Sure, Dad.”

“I want you to call your mother and tell her not to come back. Not yet. Not at this particular … It’s a very bad time for me. Tell her it’s a very bad time.”

Lowell said doubtfully, “I don’t think she’s going to pay much attention, Dad.”

“She
has
to,” his father said. “You have to make her pay attention, Lowell. Tell her to wait another month. This is very important, Lowell.”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll try.”

Lowell called his mother’s hotel in Paris to leave a message, and was disconcerted to be connected with her direct. “Dad’s very upset,” he said icily. “He doesn’t want you to come back. He wants you to wait another month.”

After a small silence, she asked him, “What do you want, Lowell?”

“I want you to stop hurting Dad.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do that, Lowell. Tell your father I’ll change our flights. We won’t come back till October.”

Lowell called his father’s office immediately. “Your father’s out of the country,” the secretary said, “but he checks for messages every day. What would you like me to tell him?”

“Tell him she agreed,” Lowell said. “She won’t come back till October. He’ll know what that means.”

The secretary repeated the message. “
She agreed
.
Won’t come back till October.
I’ll let him know.”

“Where is he?” Lowell asked.

“You know I’m not supposed to tell you that,” the secretary said. “But I did book his flight to Paris.”

“Do you know where he’s staying? Do you have a number?”

“They never let us know that,” the secretary said. “You know that, Lowell. For all I know, he might have flown on to Moscow or Timbuktu. I never know where they’re calling in from, they have a code. But he’ll get your message,” she promised.

Not until days after the hijacking did Lowell receive the note scribbled down by someone else in his dorm.
Your mother called and wants you to call her back. Says she can’t change the flight because ** (sorry, couldn’t catch name)** because someone-or-other has concert scheduled.

Lowell could never bring himself to show this note to his father. He was too shocked, too stunned, when he saw Mather next. His father seemed to have aged twenty years in a single week.
Gaunt
, Lowell thought. His father was the very embodiment of the word. There was a swatch of white hair at one temple. His face seemed to have shrunk back against the skull, the cheeks sunken beneath the bones.

“You said she agreed.” His father’s voice broke. Almost, Lowell sensed, his father was going to hug him. His father swayed, then steadied himself and extended his right hand.

Lowell shook it. “Dad,” he said.

“Son.”

“
I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man
,” his father said, “
than king of all these dead men
. Do you recognize that, Lowell?”

“The
Odyssey
,” Lowell said.

“This is a dreadful thing,” his father said. “A dreadful thing.”

“Yes,” Lowell said.

“
Bear, O my heart; thou hast borne a yet harder thing
. You said your mother agreed to wait till October.”

“She did,” Lowell said. He felt as ill as his father looked. He was vertiginous with guilt. “She did agree. I just don’t understand what happened.”

“I tried,” his father said. “I did what I could.”

It was the only time Lowell ever saw his father weep.

There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

Albert Camus,
The Plague

Death has only given every one of us a jog on the Elbow, or a pull by the sleeve as he passed by, as it were, to bid us get ready against next time he comes this Way.

Daniel Defoe,
A Journal of the Plague Year