The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (35 page)
T
HE WIND THAT NIGHT WAS SO LOUD I COULDN’T SLEEP. MY
room rattled, a powerful gust swept my desk clear, glass vase shattering, fresh-picked stalks of hydrangea scattered and helpless as the water drained into the floorboards. Maybe because I grew up next to an ocean, the wind has always engendered in me a feeling of standing on the brink. That’s the way I felt that night, as if I was wavering, blowing in the wind, buffeted between all that mattered and all that didn’t.
My mother liked to say that it wasn’t a black-and-white world, but the more I thought about it the more I thought that applies only to decorating. When it comes to right and wrong, most of the time, the choices are clear—it’s the consequences that hang you up, it’s the reasons that you give yourself that turn your world into an obliging shade of gray.
How had it come to this? I wanted to be good. There’s always time for being better, isn’t there?
I
GOT UP EARLY THE
next morning. My parents were still sleeping. I pulled on my riding boots and, shuttering the disappointed dogs inside, I quietly shut the front door and started walking. The front door opened again behind me, and my mother stepped out onto the verandah. She was wearing a gray cashmere robe. I was conscious that she was watching me, and yet I kept right on walking.
Funny, the incidental ways that life plays out. Had it been my father who appeared on the doorstep, I don’t think I would have had the courage to ignore him. Had it been Camp, I would have turned back.
Loyalty was everything to Camp. It trumped all else. Disloyalty was the only sin he couldn’t forgive. That Christmas Eve in Bastogne in 1944, my father and Michael would have been nineteen years old, the same age as Harry, not that much older than me.
I walked down the lane and imagined what it must have been like. There was no moon that night, but the sky was flooded with light from the German bombardment from above. They were laughing. Laughing until they cried, tears streaming down their cheeks. Camp told me that’s how it used to be: the worse the situation, the graver the danger, the funnier it seemed. Nobody gets it right, he said, when they talk about life at the front. We were always crazy laughing, he told me.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said to him.
When nothing makes sense, everything makes sense.
I
LET MYSELF INTO THE
tack room and threw a bridle over my shoulder. With both hands I carried a saddle, the scent of leather warming me to my task. Mary eyed me with some curiosity as I entered her stall. I took a few moments to brush her. Gave her a hand rubbing and a carrot. Her ears flicked temperamentally. She had a little edge, but I like a little edge in a horse. Beautiful dark eyes. Not like the soft blue eyes of the Gypsy horses. My father never liked blue eyes on a horse. He said women have blue eyes, horses have brown eyes. Camp loved horses but had no interest in riding.
I once asked him what bothered him most about the war. He thought about it for a moment, and then he said that maybe it was the sight of all those dead animals in the fields, the dead horses, the dead sheep, the dead cows.
T
HE WIND HAD SUBSIDED
to a whisper, a light, lovely, early autumn breeze. My hair blew back from my face as I eased Mary into an effortless canter and relaxed into her rocking-horse gait, as together we loped down the long lane away from the house and past the Cormorant Clock Farm.
“H
EY, HOFFA,” HARRY SAID,
opening the door to his house, surprised to see me. He stopped in his tracks and stared at me. “Come on in. Are you okay? How did you get here? What are you doing here?”
I followed him into the living room, the ocean spread out before us like an endless summer. White-capped waves rolled in, the early morning sun glimmering on the water’s dark surface, seagulls circling. A portrait of Charlie hung over the mantelpiece—those amber eyes staring back at me.
“Before he left for Ireland,” Harry said, “my dad put Charlie’s portrait back up.”
I took him in, Harry, memorizing his face, the way he looked back at me, knowing that he would never look at me that way again. We were standing next to each other where the glass wall opened up onto the beach and the sky and the ocean, the waves crashing against the rocks and on the sand. I reached out and took his hand in mine.
“What the hell? What’s going on?” Harry smiled, bemused.
I did it for love. For Camp. For Harry.
“Call me in five years, kid,” he cracked. He let my hand go.
Not every dream deserves to come true. Sometimes you forfeit the right to your dreams.
Harry’s expression changed. His eyes darkened. “Hoffa?”
F
OR ONE TELLING MOMENT I THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO HIT
me. He pushed me down onto the sofa and left me there while he disappeared into another part of the house. He came back in the room, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out to the car. Harry always did know the right thing to do. Harry didn’t know how not to tell. Within minutes, I was repeating my story to the police. By the end of the day, I was back at home telling it again, this time with both my parents present. At one point, Camp jumped from his seat and grabbed me by the shoulders, his feelings of shock and disappointment shaking the life out of me, the detectives rushing to pull him away.
“My God,” he said. “Riddle, why didn’t you tell us?”
I can still see my mother through the living room window after she sought refuge on the deck. She was trying to light a cigarette, but her hands were trembling so much that she couldn’t do it. “Jesus Christ,” she said, trying again, turning her back to the wind. She just kept trying to light her cigarette, one after another, flame flaring and extinguishing simultaneously.
That night, my father wrapped his arms around me and told me not to worry. He would protect me. No matter what, he loved me. “This, too, shall pass,” he said. My mother, all four dogs accompanying her, came up to the third floor where I lay in my bed unable to sleep and presented me with a cup of hot chocolate. “I made it myself,” she said.
By the next day, the story had exploded, generating headlines. I had finally found my place in the story. It seemed as if every law enforcement agency was looking for Gula, who had simply vanished.
The blond detective, the dark-haired detective and a third detective I had never seen before talked to me.
“Why did he do it?” they asked, their faces an uneven blend of curiosity and skepticism, sympathy and disdain.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know exactly what he did. But whatever it was, I think he had his reasons.”
Meanwhile, nobody knew quite what to do with me.
“Why didn’t you tell someone? Your parents? Anyone?”
“At first I didn’t know what was going on. I wanted to tell. I did. I was too scared. I waited too long.”
“It’s never too late to tell,” the dark-haired detective said.
“It was too late for me.”
“What did Gula do to scare you into silence?” asked the blond-haired detective.
I looked at everyone looking at me. I closed my eyes. It came to me.
“He killed the boy.”
T
HE NEXT DAY I
watched Camp on TV as he announced his resignation from the campaign. “I did not have anything to do with Gula Nightjar and what happened to Charlie Devlin. He occasionally volunteered to help out on the campaign, drove mostly, and that was the extent of my involvement. As far as what Mr. Devlin is alleging—I did not kill that child in Bastogne,” he added, though he admitted concealing what happened. “About that,” he said, “I will say no more.”
He tried to mitigate the extent of my involvement and blame in what had happened to Charlie. “She was only twelve years old,” he said. “She was being manipulated into silence by this man who terrorized her.”
The only time Camp faltered was when a reporter asked him directly, exasperation in his voice, why I didn’t tell anyone. Surrounded by all those microphones and whirring tape recorders, all he could do was stand before the assembled members of the press pool shaking his head in sorrow and disbelief.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why do any of us do anything? Perhaps it’s my fault. Why didn’t I tell anyone what happened all those years ago on Christmas morning? I was an adult. A soldier. I knew the difference between right and wrong and still I chose not to tell. I have to face the possibility that I may somehow have inadvertently taught her to value silence. God knows, I’ve got the biggest mouth in Massachusetts, but maybe Riddle sought refuge in the unwholesome silence at the heart of all that noise.”
H
ARRY WOULDN’T TAKE MY
calls. I rode over to see him. The house was closed up and he was gone. I just stood there knocking on the door of that empty house. I knocked and knocked but nobody answered.
A
FEW DAYS AFTER MY CONFESSION, I WENT FOR A SOLITARY
walk with Vera. I should have been in school but, given the circumstances, the decision was made for me to study from home for the time being. Vera ran on ahead, stubby legs pushing through the sand toward the tract of woods bordering the property. She barked and then disappeared into the trees.
I called after her. “Vera!” I ventured into the dense trees and swamp. “Vera, where are you?” I wailed, never far from hysteria in those days. There was a rustle and swish of grass as she finally appeared ahead of me on the trail, tail wagging, attention diverted. I followed the direction of her gaze.
Gula was standing on the path. He smiled and nodded.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said, struggling to appear calm, electricity surging through my body. I remember thinking that this is what it must feel like to be struck by lightning. “What are you doing here? Everyone is looking for you.”
“That’s fine. Let them look. I came to see you.”
I wanted to run, but my legs wouldn’t obey the command to move.
Sitting down on a tree stump a few feet from where I stood, he looked back at me in the manner of someone who had come to a decision. My throat was so dry it was as if sawdust papered the lining of my esophagus.
“You finally told,” he said.
“Leave me alone.”
“You must wonder and yet you don’t ask,” he said. “You must wonder what happened. You must be curious.”
I just stood there looking at him.
“Maybe the truth is that you don’t want to know.”
I remained silent. I could never find the words to speak to this man. It was as if he had bound and gagged me; that’s what it felt like to be in his presence.
He was taunting me, teasing me—that’s just the way he was—but he was serious, too, and not quite in the moment. I felt as if he were talking to me from a different time, a different place.
“Life is shit. People are shit,” he said.
“No, I don’t believe that.” Panting. I could hear panting. My heart was racing as if it were being chased, scurrying across my chest.
“What do I care what you believe? How do you believe, for example, a person should act when they stumble across a boy being held in a stable?”
I could hear the sound of my breathing magnified in my ears, so loud it drowned out the noise of the waves.
“We all have our reasons for what we do. I knew from the start that you wouldn’t tell. Ha! I could smell it on you.”
The winds off the ocean swept through the sand dunes, the sand cutting my skin like gunpowder, flattening grass, rushing through the barrier of ancient copper beeches and tall pine trees. The ocean sounded like a thousand jet planes landing all at once.
Gula stood up. I took two steps back. He held up his hand. “You have nothing to fear from me,” he said. Bending down and reaching behind the tree stump, he retrieved a plain box, crudely wrapped in Christmas paper. “A present,” he said. “For you.”
Slowly he walked toward me, gift extended. “Take it,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine.
“I’m sorry about the boy,” he said unexpectedly. “Charlie was a brave boy. Too bad it wasn’t Harry. Now that I might have enjoyed. Oh, well. Too late for regret. Anyway, here is my advice to you. Have patience. You will know why soon enough. God knows, patience is my greatest virtue. I have an uncommon degree of patience. I recommend it.” He laughed.
“Where will you go?”
“Away,” he said. “My business here is all but done.” He reached out and touched my hair. Speaking softly, he continued, “Very soon you will understand what I’m telling you about life. When I say that life is shit, that people are shit, the proof stands right here before me. You need look no further than the mirror to know that what I’m saying is true.”
Did he hit me? It felt as if he did, everything around me exploding. A gust of wind swept over the dunes like a vanquishing wave. “Why are you doing this?” I cried out. I closed my eyes against the stinging invasion of sand and spray. When I opened them again he was gone. Looking down at the package he’d given me, I fell to my knees, overcome by a mixture of terror and relief and sorrow and regret.
God help me, but the pity I felt at that terrible moment was for myself.
