The Assassini (7 page)

More recently it has occurred to me that he may have had a pretty accurate view of himself after all. Drew Summerhays had confided a few things to me over the years that tended to legitimize my father’s belief in his own importance. Summerhays had long been a mentor and friend to my father in much the same way my father was to the ubiquitous Curtis Lockhardt. And now Summerhays was telling me that my father and Lockhardt were laying plans for the choosing of the next pope.

Of course I remembered things from my own life that lent weight to my father’s view of himself. When I was a kid, Cardinal Spellman—he must have been bishop or archbishop then, who remembers?—was always coming over from New York to Princeton for dinner, which must have meant we were something special. He came to both the Princeton house and the very grand Park Avenue duplex which we gave up after Mother’s accident. Sometimes I heard my parents calling him “Frank,” and once
I marveled when he told me he was wearing alligator shoes. Perhaps I’d been inspecting him for feet of clay.

It must have been the call from Val that had gotten me worrying and thinking about the old days, and now I was remembering Spellman and my father and alligator shoes and the Jesuits and that long-ago night when the road was slippery and the snow was blowing and I was driving home alone with a load of bad news, wondering what my father would say, wondering how he’d confront the newest disappointment I’d devised for him.

Twenty years ago, more.

In the early morning, when the snow had almost stopped and dark of night had eased up a bit, the highway patrol had gone looking for victims of the storm. They found my Chevy racked up against a tree, totaled, the car and the tree and damn near me, and there was no evidence I’d tried to stop the car on the icy, crusty, snowy road. So they knew I must have fallen asleep. It happened sometimes. Well, that was all bullshit. I had a broken leg and I was half frozen, but the important thing was that I’d realized in the middle of the night that dying was preferable to telling my father about the Jesuits and me.

Epiphany. It was the only true moment of epiphany I’d ever had. Naturally, as it developed, my father knew the truth of what I’d tried to do that night. It was there in his eyes, the burning fires of unquenched despair, like beacon fires on a dark and treacherous shore beckoning me home, home. He knew. He knew I’d had my go at suicide, the final Catholic sin, and it was one more thing he could never forgive.

Thank God there’s Val
. He actually said it to me in the hospital afterward. Not to insult me, nor to humiliate me, but just muttering to himself under his breath. And by then, having consciously tried to end my own life, having once chosen the void, having excluded my father from the decision-making process, I no longer gave a goddamn what he thought. That was what I told myself. That was my triumph.

* * *

I skirted the edges of Princeton, turned off onto the two-lane blacktop where I’d learned to drive my father’s Lincoln, and before I knew it the headlights were poking through the whipping curtain of rain and sleet, reaching into the darkness toward the house. The long driveway passing beneath and between rows of poplars was soft with slush sucking at the tires. The gravel turnaround was yellow and muddy, the rosebushes forlorn, as if no one had been home this century. The low gable-roofed stone garage sat glum and dark on one side of the forecourt. No one had turned on the welcoming coach lanterns to light my arrival. The house itself stretched out to the left, the fieldstones glistening in the headlights like pebbles at the bottom of a streambed. The house was dark and the night was black, impenetrable, soaked. In the distance the glow of Princeton wavered pink in the rain over the treetops.

Entering the darkened front hall sent a chill rattling along my backbone. But when I flipped the switch the lights came on and everything was as it always was, the polished oak floor, pegged not nailed, and the cream molding and staircase, the olive-green walls, the gilt-framed mirrors. I went directly to the Long Room, the two steps up from the foyer, where we seemed to do most of our gathering when we returned home.

The Long Room. It had once been the main public room of the original eighteenth-century inn around which the rest of the house had been built, as was still evident from the blackened beams overhead, the scarred and scorched fireplace six feet high and ten wide, the pot hooks. But it had picked up bits and pieces over the years: the flowered slipcovers, the walls of bookcases, the enormous hooked rugs of mustard and scarlet, the coal scuttle, the mustard leather wing chairs drawn up around the stone fireplace, the yellow-shaded brass lamps, the bowls and copper pots of flowers, and at the far end of the room looking out toward the orchard and the creek, the easel where my father did some of his painting. The current canvas was large and covered with a dropcloth.

It was cold in the room, the damp chill seeping in
from outside. The ashes in the grate were dead and damp and smelled like autumn with rain dripping down the chimney turning them to mud. In the old days William and Mary lived in their own quarters and would have been bustling around, stoking the fires, greeting me with a toddy, bringing the place to life. But now William was dead, Mary had gone into retirement in Scottsdale, and the couple who served my father lived in Princeton, not in the rooms over the east wing.

I knew she wasn’t there. I called her name anyway, just for the company of the sound, and it died away in the silence. I went to the foot of one of the several staircases scattered about the place and called her name again. I heard the old scampering sound from above, like dry newspapers blowing along a gutter. The cold and rain had driven the field mice inside from under the eaves and now they were running around trying to remember where they were, which was where countless generations of their ancestors had been before them.

When we were kids Val and I had decided that the noises we heard in the walls were made by the ghost whose story we seemed to have heard at birth. He was a boy, the tale went, who had killed an English officer behind their lines and made his escape with a couple of redcoats in hot pursuit. An earlier Ben Driskill had hidden him in one of the attics, but after a week the British search party came to the Driskill holdings and searched the house. They found the boy cowering in the darkness, half dead from pneumonia, and declared him guilty on the spot. They told this long-ago Ben Driskill they were going to hang him with the boy, an object lesson for the countryside, which prompted Ben’s wife, Hannah, to appear in the doorway with a blunderbuss and the promise to put a couple of ounces of sudden death into that redcoat’s breadbasket if he didn’t satisfy himself with the one prisoner and beat it. The Brit bowed, suggested that henceforth Ben should think twice before giving aid and comfort to an enemy of Good King George, and stalked off with the killer in tow. They took the lad to the orchard and hanged him with a length of Driskill rope from a stout Driskill apple tree, from which
Ben cut him down shortly thereafter and buried him beneath the tree. His grave was still marked and we used to play out there. And we listened with wide-eyed fascination to the story of this brave rebel’s death and ghost.

I climbed the stairs now and waited but nobody—not a ghost, not a squirrel, not my sister—was going to answer me. I thought of my mother in one of her flowing nightgowns and lacy robes standing in the hallway, her hand out as if she were trying to reach me from far away. How long ago had that happened? Her lips forming words which I must have heard then but could no longer recall … Why couldn’t I remember what she’d said while I could recall exactly the scent of her cologne and powder? And why was her face lost in the shadows of the hall? Was she young? Or was she gray? How old had I been when she’d come forward, hand out, saying something, trying to make me understand something?

I went back downstairs, took an umbrella, went outside. The rain was blowing sideways in the ghostly glow of the coach lights. I pulled the trench-coat collar up and went to the little underpass between two wings of the house and ducked underneath. The rain rattled on the mullioned windows above and in the lead gutters, spewed out furiously, slowly turning to ice that would build up and eventually block the drainpipe. Some things just never changed.

I set off across the lawn where we used to play croquet and badminton. The lights from the windows of the Long Room cast yellow fingers pointing the way toward the chapel.

We had our own chapel, of course. My father’s father had built it in the twenties to satisfy one of my grandmother’s whims of iron. It was “of the period,” as they say in guidebooks, brick and stone and black and white trim with what my grandmother used to call “a very nice steeple, not too proud of itself,” which was always in need of repair. We weren’t English Catholics like Evelyn Waugh’s and we didn’t keep a tame priest of our own on the family payroll, but we pretty much supported those who served at St. Mary’s in the nearby village of New Prudence. Growing up, I thought that having your own
church was insane but I learned to shut up about it. When I went to the St. Augustine School, having your own chapel didn’t seem quite so preposterous. Some other kids were in the same boat.

Now the chapel was dripping in the rain like something you’d find in an old English churchyard, in a poem. It was dark and dreary and full of mice. The grass needed cutting. It was lacquered over with a thin coating of ice. I grabbed the handrail and climbed the steps to the iron-bound oaken door. The ring handle squeaked slightly when I gave it a tug. A single candle guttered in the rush of air from the doorway. One little candle. The chapel was utterly black beyond the halo of light, almost as if it were just emptiness. Still, Val must have been there to light the candle. And then she’d gone off somewhere.

I went back to the house, turned off the lights. I couldn’t bear the idea of making myself at home in that cold house without Val. It wasn’t like her to leave me hanging. But it was a rotten night and she may have had errands and gotten slowed down somewhere. She’d show up later.

I was hungry and needed a drink. I got into the car and took one look back at the lonely old house in the pelting rain, and drove in to Princeton.

There was a pleasant buzz of conversation in the downstairs taproom of the Nassau Inn. The bar was crowded. There was a haze of smoke, the faint air of clubbiness that clings to the name if not to the actual place itself. There were the framed photographs of Hoby Baker and other heroes of another age, the deep carvings of generations of Tigers in the tops of the tables. The smoky haze might have been the mists of time.

I sank into a booth and ordered a double dry Rob Roy and realized how tense I was. It was Val and the fear in her voice, and now where was she? She’d been so insistent, and now nothing. Had she put a match to that single candle?

My cheeseburger had just arrived when I heard someone call my name. “Ben! Ben boy, a blast from the past!”

I looked up into the boyish, blue-eyed face of Terence O’Neale—Father Terence O’Neale, who was between Val and me in age but would always look like a freshman somewhere. Everybody used to call him Peaches because he had one of those perfect peaches-and-cream complexions, eternally youthful, ever innocent. We’d known Peaches forever. We’d played tennis and golf and he’d always contended that I’d gotten him drunk the first time, out back in our orchard. He was smiling down at me, blue eyes glinting, dangling over the chasm of the past.

“Take a load off, Peach,” I said, and he was sliding into the booth across from me with a beer of his own. He hadn’t started out to become a priest: that was pretty much Val’s doing. Golf and motorcycles and the world beer-chugging record, that’s what Terence O’Neale had seen when he looked into his future. That and a wife and a bunch of kids and maybe a job on Wall Street. Val was supposed to be Mrs. O’Neale. It had sounded fine to me. Now I hadn’t seen him in four or five years but he hadn’t changed. He wore a white buttondown and a tweed jacket. Vinnie would have approved.

“So what brings you back to the scene of our crimes?”

“I’m a workingman, Ben. Got a job over in New Pru. I’m the padre at St. Mary’s. It’s a little spooky—I keep looking out during the homily and I keep thinking I’ll see us, you and me and Val.” He grinned at the Lord’s mysterious ways.

“Since when? Why didn’t you call me?”

“Just since summer. I’ve seen your father. You should have seen him do a double take. I figured I’d catch you at Christmas. Val said she might get a skating party together out back of the orchard. She said I shouldn’t expect you at mass.”

“She got that right. I’ve been going straight for twenty years, as you damn well know.”

He plucked a french fry from my plate. “So what are you doing here? Your dad says you don’t get home much.”

“How true. Of course he’s still wondering if I’m really
his son. Maybe there was a mix-up in the maternity ward. It’s the only hope he has left.”

“You’re awfully hard on the old boy, aren’t you?”

“Nope. Anyway, I didn’t come out here to see him. I got a call this afternoon from Val, all mysterious and determined to get me out here tonight. So I came through all this crud and she’s not home to meet me.” I shrugged. “When did you see her? What’s this skating party thing? I hate skating—”

“When she was passing through last summer on her way to Rome, we had dinner. Old time’s sake.” He took another fry. “I think you’re right about that mysterious sound—there’s something going on, she’s been doing some pretty heavy research … she wrote me from Rome, then Paris.” His face clouded for a moment. “She’s writing this monster of a book, Ben. World War Two and the Church.” He made a face. “Not a time the Church likes to brag about—”

“With good reason,” I said.

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Pius was Pius and I was just a little kid in Princeton, New Jersey.”

He finished off my fries, grinning at me. I felt a surge of warmth. Val had been pretty serious about Peaches, had told me she might just marry him. They became lovers when she was seventeen.