Innocence: A Novel (7 page)

Sadness overcame me. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Who does?”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I guess not.”

She said, “I’m eighteen.”

“I thought no older than sixteen, maybe even thirteen now that I’ve seen you up close.”

“I have a boyish body.”

“Well, no.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Boyish the way that very young girls can seem boyish. Why do you hide your face?”

I was intrigued that she had taken so long to ask the question. “I don’t want to scare you off.”

“I don’t care about appearances.”

“It’s not just appearances.”

“Then what is it?”

“When they see me, people are repulsed, afraid. Some of them hate me or think they do, and then … well, it goes badly.”

“Were you burned or something?”

“If it were only that,” I said. “A couple of them tried to set me on fire once, but I was already … already what I am before they tried.”

“It’s not cold in here. So are the gloves part of it?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “They look like hands to me.”

“They are. But they … suggest the rest of me.”

“You’re like the Grim Reaper in that hood.”

“Look like but am not.”

“If you don’t want me to see you, I won’t try,” she said. “You can trust me.”

“I think I can.”

“You can. But I have a rule, too.”

“What rule?”

“You can’t touch me. Not even the slightest, most casual touch. Especially not skin to skin. Especially not that. But also not your glove to my jacket. No one can touch me. I won’t permit it.”

“All right.”

“That was quick enough to be a lie.”

“But it wasn’t. If I touch you, you’ll pull the hood off my head. Or if instead you make the first move and pull the hood off my head, then I’ll touch you. We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.” I smiled again, an unseen smile. “We’re made for each other.”

AT THE AGE OF EIGHT, WITH NO IDEA WHERE I WAS
bound, I came to the city on a Sunday night, aboard an eighteen-wheeler with a flatbed trailer hauling large industrial machinery that I couldn’t identify. The machines were secured to the truck with
chains and covered with tarps. Between the tarps and the machines were nooks where a boy of my size could conceal himself. I had gotten aboard when the driver had been having dinner, near twilight, in the coffee shop at a truck stop.

Two days earlier, I had run out of things to eat. My mother had sent me away with a backpack full of food, which I supplemented with apples from an untended orchard that I chanced upon. Although I had raised myself more than I’d
been
raised, though I had grown up more in the wilds than in our small house, I possessed no knowledge of what safely edible smorgasbord, if any, forests and fields might offer.

After a day of hunger, early on Sunday morning, I made my way through a sort of pine barrens, where the soil was peaty. The land spread out too flat and the underbrush grew too sparse to allow me to feel safe. For the most part, there was nothing to hide behind but trees, with the boughs far overhead and the trunks not all that thick. When I looked around, I seemed to be in a dream about a vast cloister where thousands of columns stood in no discernible pattern. Through the staggered trees, you couldn’t see far in a straight line. But as I passed through, horizontal movement in all that vertical architecture and stillness, I couldn’t possibly be missed by anyone who happened to be there.

Voices raised in song should have sent me scurrying toward some distant silent place, but instead I found myself drawn to them. I ran in a crouch and then, nearing the last of the pines, crawled to the tree line. Cars and pickups were parked on a graveled area a hundred yards to my left. Half that distance to the right, a languid river flowed like molten silver in the early light.

About forty people were gathered at the water’s edge, singing a hymn, and the preacher stood in the river with a woman of about thirty-five, engaged upon a full-immersion baptism. To one side of
the choir stood a man and two children, who seemed to be waiting their turns for salvation.

Directly ahead of me, across an expanse of grass, past all those people, stood a humble clapboard church, white with pale-blue trim. Near the building, in the shade of a great spreading oak, were chairs surrounding picnic tables that appeared to be laden with enough food to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner during a full day of church and family fun.

The members of the congregation stood with their backs to me, busy with their hymnals and focused on the joyous event in the river. If the minister looked my way, I would be screened by the members of his congregation. I might not have much time, but I thought I would have enough.

I stripped off my backpack, zippered open its main compartments, broke from the trees, and sprinted to the picnic tables. On the grass near them were baseballs, bats, and gloves, also a badminton net not yet erected, rackets, and shuttlecocks. I had never played such games or heard of them, and those items meant nothing to me; I would not be able to identify them, in memory, until years later.

When I tore the foil off a platter, I found thick slices of ham. I wrapped several in the foil and shoved them in the backpack. There were potato salads and pasta salads covered with plastic wrap or lids, pies and cakes, none of them easy enough to pack. But I also found baskets of homemade rolls and biscuits covered by napkins, oranges, bananas, hard-boiled eggs pickled purple in beet juice, and cookies of all kinds.

From a pocket of my jeans, I withdrew part of the wad of cash that my mother had given me, peeled off a few bills, and dropped them on the table. Considered in retrospect, I probably paid far too much for
what I had taken. But at the time, shaking with hunger, I felt that no price was too high to satisfy my growling stomach.

Sweating cans of soda and tea and juice were layered in plastic tubs of ice. After I slipped the straps of the backpack over my shoulders, I snatched up a cold Coca-Cola.

Just then someone behind me said, “Child, it’s time for the Lord, not breakfast yet.”

Startled, I turned, looked up, and saw a man coming out of a side door of the church, carrying a pan piled high with barbecued chicken legs.

Under thinning hair and a high brow, his face was soft and kindly—until he saw
my
face enclosed but not fully hidden by the hood of my jacket. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes widened as if the darkness of Armageddon had suddenly fallen upon the world and as if he were straining to see what must surely be the devil come to wage a final battle. The pan of chicken legs dropped from his hands, the color drained from his face in an instant, and he staggered two steps backward on abruptly weak legs. When he had taken in the totality of my face, he focused on my eyes, and a strangled sound escaped him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry.”

My apology meant nothing to him, nor did the cash upon the table, which I pointed out to him. He plucked a Louisville Slugger off the grass, lunged forward, and swung it, cutting the air above my head with enough power to have blasted a ball out of the park if the game had been under way.

I feinted left, he swung, I ducked and dodged right, he swung again and was almost quick enough to slam me. But then he seemed to be shocked by—aghast at—his sudden ferocious assault on a creature as small as a child, and he dropped the bat. Again, he reeled back
from me, his face now wrenched with what might have been remorse or even anguish, a flood of tears sorrowing into his eyes, and he put one hand to his mouth as a cry of something like grief came from him.

They were singing louder than ever at the river. No one had yet seen the encounter by the picnic tables.

“I’ll go,” I said, “I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

As I broke into a run, I thought that in spite of his tears and his wrenching sobs, he was stooping to grab the baseball bat again. I raced past the back of the church, across mown grass, into a wild meadow, angling away from the river, desperate for the next pine barren, hoping that it would be furnished with more brush and with a topography more friendly to a fugitive.

I never glanced over my shoulder. I don’t know whether the churchman pursued me for a quarter mile or a hundred yards, or any distance at all. Perhaps half an hour later, after the land had risen from peaty flats to more solid slopes, when my lungs burned and I began to flag, I paused on a wooded knoll to look back through the trees, whereupon I saw that no vigilantes were at my heels.

Driven by fear that temporarily quelled my hunger, I walked for another two hours, until I found a place that seemed remote enough to be safe. I sat upon a fern-skirted outcropping of rocks to eat some of what I had acquired at the church, my table a broad flat stone, luncheon music provided by birds high in the surrounding pines.

As I ate, I wondered at the farrago of emotions that the very sight of me had stirred up in the churchman with the soft and kindly face. I expected to inspire terror. Likewise repulsion and disgust. But his reaction had been more complicated than that of the stabbed man who tried to stab me in turn, more nuanced than the homicidal loathing of the midwives as it had been recounted to me by Mother. Even
in its brevity, the churchman’s reaction to me had been almost as complicated as the much longer relationship between me and my mother.

Mother and I had never discussed what I might be, as if it was burden enough to know that I was an abomination from which even she, having carried me within her, most often had to avert her eyes. My body, my hands, my face, my eyes, my impact on everyone who saw me: Any attempt to discuss those things, analyze them, and theorize about my nature only sharpened her aversion to me, sickened her until mere depression became despair.

A bird of some kind, small with a blue chest, dared to perch on the edge of the large flat stone that served as my table. I scattered biscuit crumbs toward it, and the bird hopped closer as it feasted. It had no fear of me, did not expect me to seize it in one fist and crush the life from it, knew that it was safe with me, and it
was
safe.

I thought then that perhaps I should spend my life in the deep woods, where I would be accepted. I could venture into areas of human habitation only at night, to get food wherever I could find it, and only until I might eventually learn to live off the bounty that the wildlands offered.

But even then, young and still unaware of my nature, I wanted more than peace and survival. I felt that I had a purpose that could be fulfilled only elsewhere, among the very people who were repelled by me. I felt I had a destiny, though I didn’t know that it would be in the city where soon thereafter I came to live.

Later that very Sunday, in the lengthening purple shadows of twilight, miles from the stone table on which I had lunch, I found the truck stop and the eighteen-wheeler flatbed carrying the tarp-covered machinery. Aboard, I was brought to the city, arriving after midnight.

In the dark early hours of that Monday morning, I first saw the
disturbing marionette in the lighted display window of the antique-toy store, as it sat with its back against a hand-carved rocking horse of whimsical design, its tuxedo rumpled, legs bent awkwardly, arms limp, black eyes with red striations seeming to follow me as I walked past.

AS I WENT WHERE GWYNETH LED ME BY FLASHLIGHT
, along the hallways of the less public areas of the library, I said, “Where are you from? I mean, before the city.”

“I was born here.”

She named a year and a day in early October, and I halted in surprise. “You’re eighteen.”

“As I told you before.”

“Yes, but you look so much younger that I just didn’t think …”

She cupped one hand over the lens of the flashlight, letting just enough shine between her fingers to hold back the dark while ensuring that she could face me without a risk of revelation. “You just didn’t think … what?”

“I’m twenty-six, you’re eighteen—and we’ve both been in the city eighteen years.”

“What’s so remarkable about that?”

I said, “The day you were born—it’s the day I came here as a stowaway on an eighteen-wheeler, in the first hour of that morning.”

“You say that as if it must be more than a coincidence.”

“I think it must be,” I confirmed.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s something, though.”

“Don’t tell me it’s kismet. There’s not going to be anything like that between us.”

“Kismet doesn’t imply romance,” I said a bit defensively.

“Just don’t infer it.”

“I’ve no illusions about romance.
Beauty and the Beast
is a nice fairy tale, but fairy tales are for books.”

“You’re no beast, and I’m no beauty.”

“As for me,” I said, “my own mother seemed to feel that
beast
was an inadequate word for me. As for you … eye of the beholder.”

After a thoughtful silence, she said, “If a man is a beast, he’s a beast in his heart, and that’s not the kind of heart that beats in you.”

Her words touched me and left me speechless.

“Come on, Addison Goodheart. We’ve got some snooping to do.”

J. Ryan Telford, curator of the great library’s rare-book and art collections, had his name on a wall plaque beside his office door.

By the narrow beam of Gwyneth’s flashlight, we passed through the reception lounge where Telford’s secretary had a desk. The inner office, with a full bath adjoining for the curator’s private use, was immense and elegantly furnished in Art Deco antiques. The girl proved to be knowledgeable about the furnishings and showed me the Makassar-ebony desk by Pierre-Paul Montagnac, the Brazilian-rosewood sideboard with Portoro-marble top by Maurice Rinck, the fine sofa and matching armchairs of ebonized lemon wood by Patout and Pacon, the lamps by Tiffany and Galle, the ivory and cold-patinated bronze sculptures by Chiparus, who was arguably the greatest sculptor of the period, and throughout the tour, she scrupulously kept the light away from me, so that even the back glow did not reveal the slightest hint of my face.