Memoir From Antproof Case (54 page)

When the elevator door opened on the archives floor, Miss Dickstein got out and I got in. She smiled at me, and I smiled at her. Even had she noticed what I was carrying, which I think she did not, she might not have recognized it. She may never have actually seen any of the records she guarded. And even had she suspected that I had removed something from her domain, she probably would have dismissed her concerns when she returned to her station and saw that the locks were solidly in place.

 

This was a Friday. When I told the moron Sherman Oscovitz that I was leaving early, he tried to play medical detective.

"Oh?" he said. "Why?"

"I don't feel well."

"Where?"

"In my mongus," I said.

"Is it a dull ache or a sharp pain?"

"It's an enthralling torture."

"Do you have a fever?"

"I don't know," I told him. "Feel my brow."

"What's a brow?"

"Up here." I pointed.

In the moment that Sherman Oscovitz stepped closer, raised his right hand, and slowly brought it to my face, I closed my eyes and thought of the things that Sydney wanted me to do, things I had never heard of, things
she
had never heard of, and my temperature went up to about 105 degrees. Oscovitz recoiled in alarm.

"You're burning up!"

"Associative caffeine thrombolysis," I said, and left for the weekend.

By this time my own apartment had been taken over by Angelica and Constance Smedjebakken, and I didn't want to go to Astoria or to Sydney's, the former because I found it depressing when Smedjebakken was absent, and the latter because I needed to retain my ability to walk.

Instead, I went up the Hudson to Athens, the quietest most forgotten town in the world, and stayed in the hotel there. On the train, I touched my briefcase again and again, but rather than open it I read the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Herald Tribune.
I no longer had any need of newspapers, either professionally or personally, but they were a habit and I was glad that they kept me from my task.

Once in the hotel, I stationed myself by the window, and, for two days, I starved. The management thought that I had come to commit suicide, and sent the chambermaid into the room every few hours to check on me. Finally I said, "Don't come in here again, and tell the proprietor not to worry that I'm going to commit suicide. I'm a physicist, and I need absolute tranquility to reconcile Newtonian Mechanics with the Theory of Relativity."

I don't think she caught my drift, because the next thing I knew the kitchen delivered a plate of Fig Newtons, but then, perhaps happy that I was eating, they left me alone.

I stared at the Hudson for two days without seeing a single boat, and for two days I gazed upon the railroad tracks and did not see a train. I love forgotten towns, for it is in forgotten towns that you can appreciate the curtains moving inward with the breeze, and in forgotten towns that you can breathe easy, and listen to the ticking of a clock, and see the light come up.
In forsaken towns the world is not a symphony of distractions, it is the lovely sound of wind blowing across the water, or an old tree bending under the burden of its half a million young and impatient leaves. I sat by the window in the hotel in Athens, the green file on the table next to me, and was still for two days as I fell back into the reverence of childhood. I knew God when I was a child, seeing His presence at every turn. It was easy—saints, and lambs, and an eye that had just awakened and was keen for detail. And, most of all, I was happy in the absolute love and devotion of my father and mother, and free, therefore, to see beyond the pain of the world.

The wind quietly moved the white curtains, made ripples on the bend in the river, and swayed the trees just enough for me to hear. The radiator hissed and knocked. Once in a while I would hear a door close, a car go by, or footsteps on the stairs. I could not open the folder.

I stared at the rug, which was green with pale roses woven in a garland of dusty red. I slept and dreamed. I looked at the river. It was not that I was afraid. I was not afraid. And it was not that I thought for even an instant that I would fail to open the folder. I knew that I would not fail.

It was that I was mourning what I assumed would be the imminent destruction of the previous forty years, and preparing myself for a great change. As long as my mother and father had died in mystery, and were unavenged, my heart had been open to them. Now I was preparing to close the chapter, and, I feared, close my heart.

I could hardly take my eyes from the river and the waters I once had known so well. I watched the wind move the diaphanous curtains. I suppose you might say that I was crazy, but love moved me. In that long abandoned long lost town, on the shore of the Hudson, I spent two sleepless days loving the
quiet things that were left to me, preparing myself, saying goodbye.

 

When, on the train to New York on Sunday evening, I finally opened the folder, my eyes were as cold as steel. It was dark outside, and as all the Vassar girls were riding in the opposite direction, the train was nearly empty. In yellow light reflected mercilessly from blackened windows I was incapacitated by tenderness no longer, which was good, for although tenderness has its place, life is driven not by tenderness but by vigor.

Though the folder was an inch thick, I knew within a minute or two that the mystery would be solved. In ten minutes I had skimmed the documents and tied together an indictment, and by the time I reached Grand Central I had read the entire account and knew it indelibly.

It was all fairly simple. The first entry was a letter dated 27 August, 1909, when I was not quite five. In it, a Mr. Schellenberger pointed out to one of Mr. Edgar's lieutenants that it was physically possible to bridge the Hudson. He had in mind a suspended span from the Palisades to the heights of Kingsbridge in the Bronx.

Such a bridge would have been spectacular, especially since, to match the altitude of the Palisades, a great ramp would have had to have been constructed on the New York side. The bridge would be visible, Schellenberger claimed, from the Catskills, Long Island Sound, the Ramapos, and New York's seaward approaches. The key to its placement was simply that the river at the point he proposed is relatively narrow.

Mr. Schellenberger disappeared, but in the year of Wilson's election came a flood of memoranda, notes, and letters in which the focus shifted northward. The City of New York was un-receptive to a public bridge built for private gain. As the wood there was too hard, Mr. Edgar's chisel would have to be directed elsewhere, but the Yonkers politicians, as happy as they would have been to accept a bribe, were beholden to the bosses in the great city upon which Yonkers was fated to sit forever like a cat on a Percheron.

North of Yonkers the river widened and the rock gave way to marsh. According to consultants hired by Stillman and Chase, it was not technically feasible to bridge the Tappan Zee—too much shifting of the river floor, and too wide. The nearest available site was Teller's Point, where the distance to both sides of the river was a mile and the geology favorable.

Advice to Mr. Edgar was that if a bridge and its associated approaches were built on this spot, a vast city would spring up on both banks of the Hudson. With the automobile's conquest of distance, no one would think twice about approaching New York from the rest of the continent via a bridge only thirty miles to the north.

"Why not just take over the ferry traffic?" Mr. Edgar had scrawled in the margin. The answer must have come verbally, because it was nowhere in the folder, but it was undoubtedly that no ferry has ever been able to compete with a bridge.

In January of 1914, Mr. Edgar wrote instructions to his lieutenants. The project was to go ahead. Everything had to be done in the greatest secrecy. If not, the price of surrounding lands would rise, defeating the rationale for the scheme in the first place, by unacceptably raising the cost of construction in relation to the probable returns. The most important parcels were obviously those directly in the path of the crossing and nearby, and no effort should be spared in securing them. The farmers were not likely to want to sell their land at prices low enough
to allay suspicion of development. "In this case," he wrote, "do what is necessary to secure the properties, dealing as harshly as may be required with the first people with whom you deal, so that the others will understand and fall into line."

When I read that, I thought of Mr. Edgar, and, even though he wasn't there I said to him, "It may have taken forty years, but you blew it, and you're going to die." I was hardened by those lines to the point where my moral qualms about killing a helpless man receded so far that I could no longer sense them.

In the middle of the dossier was a foldout map of both banks of the Hudson and Teller's Point in between. My father's farm was clearly delineated and identified. Across the property, in engineer's or draftsman's style, were drawn the main approach ramp for the bridge, and the easternmost pier and anchors. The roadway went right through our house.

I suppose Mr. Edgar was right. My father never would have sold out, because what was at stake here was not money but love. Without killing my father, Mr. Edgar never would have been able to put his bridge in place.

But even though he did kill my father (and, for good measure, my mother, too) he did not put up his bridge. He would have, but that summer the war came. He would build ships instead, and direct his capital to the expansion of steel and rubber production. My parents were killed not even for a bridge. They were killed for nothing, like birds that hunters shoot-and leave behind in the field.

The evidence at that point was enough, though it may not have been sufficient in a court of law, but any lingering uncertainties vanished when I came upon two receipts bound into the pages of the folder. Both were dated June 8th, 1914, and each was for $1,000. One was signed by a Mr. Curtin, and the other by a Joseph Nevel. In a businesslike hand that matched neither signature, someone had written, "For services rendered, June 5th, 1914."

 

Never have I been quite as relaxed about anything as I was initially about the murder of Eugene B. Edgar. I realize that this might seem a trifle coldhearted, but look, you know, he killed my mother and father. I realize that the impulse of many people would be to help him, to
rehabilitate
him. I can only say, let them help and rehabilitate the murderers of their families, I will deal with the murderers of mine somewhat differently. I was neither proud of what I was going to do, nor ashamed. I would take no pleasure in it, but I knew what was required of me, and that I simply could not shirk.

I brought no tools or weapons, and was outfitted only in a pair of Florentine driving gloves, a navy-blue polo shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and rubber-soled shoes. This is what I normally would have worn, except for the gloves, which I kept in my pocket until I needed them. They were fashioned of very strong and supple leather, they were extremely thin, and in my pocket they looked like a folded handkerchief. I took some cash, in $20 bills, for train fare, gasoline, and tolls, and I carried a newspaper. I have always loved to travel light.

The gold was already loaded on the plane, along with some photographs, letters, and a few mementos: my father's pocketknife, his gold-rimmed spectacles, my mother's wedding ring, a locket of her hair, my pistol from the war, and a beautiful little Sargent that Constance had given me, in which a woman in a white dress is walking down a garden path, holding the hand of a young child.

The Smedjebakkens were gone; all my possessions sold, donated, or burned. The remnants of my bank accounts had been converted to Swiss francs and were in my flight bag with the
pistol. The landing strips were prepared, the apartment in Brazil waiting. Most reassuring was that the Smedjebakkens had arrived safely at their destination, and this I knew because I had received a telegram that read:
GREAT HAPPINESS MOZART SNOW COVERED MOUNTAINS MAGNIFICENT CITIES MARBLE HALLS CRYSTAL POOLS AND CHOCOLATE CAKES STOP PAOLO.

No one knew that the gold was missing. No one knew that the plane was gassed, loaded, and waiting in the barn. No one knew that I had liquidated everything I had and that the Smedjebakkens had started a new life. No one knew what I was going to do, or where to find me. Even Sydney had broken off our affair, saying that such a thing was acceptable only once in a lifetime, and not for too long, which I thought was both sensible and a great relief. I was free. I had no friends or family and I would never be missed, but I was free. I walked through the streets of New York like a visitor from another world, and yet this was my city, that I knew and loved so well. But, still, I had the lightness of being that you feel when you are graduated from an institution that you intend to put behind you forever.

It was early September, and still hot. The humid storms had been replaced by summer heat in declining light, the prelude to golden autumn. I took the train out to Greenwich at commuter time, sitting in the rear car with the conductors on their last run. I knew that investment bankers habituated the forward cars, so I had boarded the train early and was the last to get off. No one saw me in the Greenwich twilight as hundreds of engines started in the parking lots amid the scramble to get in position for the race home on horribly winding roads. In the dusk I walked briskly onto Fishcake Lane, and as darkness fell I found myself at the edge of the Sound, looking across a beautiful rolling moor at the light from Dickey Piehand's estate in Mianus.

It was as immense as an ocean liner bobbing and twinkling on the brine off East Hampton. All the lights were on, and from the darkness in the still fragrant vegetation it looked as bright as if someone inside were filming a movie. I wondered if Ed Murrow were visiting Dickey Piehand, but not a truck was in sight.

I walked across the moor in the dark, smelling the sand, the heather, and many plants that I couldn't identify, having been terribly ill in the weeks in which I was supposed to have studied botany. I love plants, but have always hated it when people go from one to another saying their names. Quite often, people, especially very rich people, are overcome with joyful contempt when I don't know the name of some lousy fucking plant. "You mean, you don't know that this is a palustral helichrysum?" I always reply that these plants about which they are so irritatingly reverent don't know what they are, either. And just because, two hundred years ago, a clerk in a Danish arboretum called the vegetable we are discussing a palustral helichrysum doesn't mean that it really is a palustral helichrysum. The plant is what it is, and palustral helichrysum be damned.