The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (36 page)
C
AMP WAS TALKING TO MY MOTHER IN THE LIVING ROOM
when I returned to the house. Sneaking up the back staircase, I tried to avoid him, but he heard me and called me down the stairs. “Just a minute,” I said, shoving the present from Gula into the linen closet.
Summoning up what little courage I had, I came down the stairs. My parents looked up in unison to greet me.
“Riddle, we need to talk,” my father said, not unkindly.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said. “There’s nothing to say.”
“I’m sorry, kid, but there is plenty to say,” Camp said. “Come here and sit down and listen to me.”
My mother nodded her agreement as I took my place on the sofa and stared up at Camp, who was standing by the fireplace. She sat down across from me in an armchair.
“First, I didn’t kill that little girl, regardless of what Michael Devlin claims. Nor do I know anything about Gula or his involvement in anything. I feel quite confident in saying that Michael is as ignorant on the subject of Gula Nightjar as I am.
“It’s entirely probable, given the circumstances, that Gula tried to kill Harry, as well as Charlie. Why? How the hell should I know? Harry, because of the dog. Charlie? Maybe it was a kidnapping for ransom that went deadly wrong. Some things aren’t knowable, starting with why you never told us about the Devlin boy. Which brings me to another crucial point in the discussion. Frankly, Riddle, the only person who knew anything about what was going on here was you.”
Shame and guilt covered me like a second skin. Desperate for a place to hide, I reached for the afghan thrown over the back of the sofa and covered my face with it as I lay back into the cushions.
I felt my mother’s presence next to me. To my everlasting surprise, she took my hand in hers and held on as my father carried on talking.
“Why didn’t you come to us? Why didn’t you come to me?” He stopped talking, as if he was fortifying himself. “I think it’s time for me to tell you what happened all those years ago. Maybe if I had done so when it first came up . . . Well, both of us will have to live with the consequences of that choice. Anyway, you deserve to know what happened overseas.
“The truth is, I was with Michael Devlin on the roof in Bastogne, but I did not shoot that child. Michael did.” He paused. “There. I’ve said it. Finally.” He took a few deep breaths before resuming. “She appeared out of nowhere, I can still see her in her white blouse. It was cold. She wore a ragged jacket with no buttons. Her coat was open. She walked over to the well with her little metal pitcher and he took aim and fired. He dropped her on the spot. I couldn’t believe it. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot. I went nuts. I took a swing at him. We got into it right there on the roof, rolled down the incline and fell onto the ground. I fractured my collarbone. A couple of guys from the platoon broke us up. They wanted to turn Michael over to the military police. Mad and sick as I was, I argued against it. Worst mistake of my life. The irony is that he never forgave me for it.”
“Why would you defend him?” I was talking to him from behind the safety of my blanket.
“I grew up with him. He was a good soldier. I’d fought alongside him all through the Ardennes. I couldn’t bring myself to turn against him. I swore to keep it a secret.”
“I don’t understand. Why would he say that you did it? Why would he want to harm you when you were only trying to protect him?”
“You have a lot to learn about life, Riddle,” my father said. “I have enough trouble trying to figure out what makes me tick, let alone try to understand what winds someone else’s clock. Michael wasn’t the man he purported to be. God help anyone who discovered otherwise.
“I shouldn’t have kept it a secret. I should have come forward. I should have talked to you about it when Michael came back. I thought I had good reason for not talking about it.”
He stopped and threw his hands up in the air.
“For Christ’s sake, Jimmy, I never even talked to myself about it.”
C
AMP DECIDED TO TAKE
a walk on the beach.
“You go ahead,” my mother said. “I’ll be along.”
Declining an invitation to join them, I withdrew to my bedroom after retrieving my gift from Gula. I was trying to make up my mind about whether to tell my father about Gula’s visit. I decided to tell him. He was right: no more secrets.
Soon. I thought there was time.
The low flat box, with its frayed and clumsy Christmas wrap, a cheerful snowman leering at me, sat in the middle of my bed, a threat and a lure at the same time.
I ripped through the paper and took off the lid. Inside was a young girl’s blouse, white originally though grown yellow with the passage of time. Tiny pearl-white buttons fastened in place, collar sweetly turned down, it was an old-fashioned girl’s blouse, delicately invested with the fragrance of warm recollection, like a sprig of alyssum pressed between the pages of someone’s memory.
I hesitated before touching it. It seemed so old, I thought it might turn to dust. Taking it from the box, I held it up to the light of day. Only then did I notice the dried-blood spatter on the blouse’s back panel, though the color, once a violent crimson, had faded so that now it was a depleted, almost graphic palette, in some spots gentle as mauve, in others blunt as stone. Whatever happened to the girl that wore this blouse had long since ceased to be a matter of red and was now a thing of gray.
Underneath the blouse were a handful of pictures and some newspaper clippings. One photo was of a little girl, long dark hair, black eyes, smiling. I looked on the back of the print.
“Oma,” someone had written, “neuf ans, 1943” and then, beneath that inscription: “October 14, 1934–December 25, 1944.”
There was another picture of the same little girl. This time she was sitting beside a young boy, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. I would have recognized that face anywhere.
“Oma avec son grand frère, Gula.”
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud, combing through the rest of the photos and clippings—news stories about Michael Devlin, pictures of Charlie and Harry, stories about the Devlin stables, the Cormorant Clock Farm, articles about Camp, about his books, about his announcement that he was running for Congress, shots of my mother staring back at me glowing like a pinup girl.
I pulled out a full page torn from the
New York Times
six years earlier. It was a feature story about Michael and the history of the Devlin family’s contribution to thoroughbred racing, and it was illustrated by a lifetime of photos tracing his eventful biography, including a shot of him as a toddler captioned “The Devlin Baby.”
There was a picture of him with his dead wife, Polly, a candid shot of him with Harry and Charlie on ponies, a black-and-white photo of him with Greer Foley, “The Toast of Hollywood.” There was a picture of Michael and Camp—identified as his Wellfleet neighbor and boyhood chum, “the noted biographer, labor activist, and musical composer Godfrey Camperdown.”
They were in uniform, teenage boys, carefree and laughing, their arms around each other, the picture taken a few days before they left for Europe. The photo had a circle drawn around it in red—not one circle, but several red circles, violent with recognition.
Beneath all the books and the photos and the newspaper clippings there were several layers of beige tissue paper, the kind used for wrapping fragile objects. Carefully, tentatively, I drew back one layer and then another and that’s when I saw her again—the doll with no face.
“W
HERE’S CAMP?” I SAID,
breathless, racing down the stairs into the kitchen.
“He’s out on the dunes,” my mother said. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“I know! I know!” I shouted, running from the kitchen through the back door and out onto the deck. My father was standing at the top of the highest dune overlooking infinity.
“Camp!” I screamed as I ran to meet him. He looked up and waved, both arms over his head.
I caught up with him at the edge of the cliff. Out of breath, I bent over, gasping.
“What the hell?” he said, covering his forehead with his hand, blocking the glare of the sun from his eyes. I followed his gaze. Down below us was Boomslang, a black-and-white apparition, running free along the sand, tail and mane blowing wildly, galloping in a straight line down the deserted beachfront, ocean froth at his hooves.
The Gypsy horse was the last thing my father ever saw.
The shot from the rifle sheered off the top of his skull. In the midst of the terror and the tumult, in the seconds that it took Camp to fall from the top of the world to the ocean’s floor, I had found this quiet spot inside myself and I saw him, right in front of me, there he was, all of his colors beginning silently to fade, his green eyes, that chestnut hair. He was disappearing, his luster waning, soaking into the ground like the mist from the ocean, hemorrhaging into the roots of the tall grass.
In the end he was gently subsiding in the fury of a September day, conveyed on a cold nomadic wind to places unknown.
I watched my father disappear amidst the waves, until all there was left was the ghostly outline of bubbling foam on the ocean’s surface and the memory of something vivid.
“I
RAN INTO HARRY DEVLIN
last night.”
Outside a robin sang, its familiar morning chirrup slicing through the gradually receding cover of night. White tulips bloomed. Blue wildflowers covered the front yard. A gentle ocean breeze blew in through the open living room window.
I was lying on the sofa in my nightgown, freshly bathed and snug under a hand-knit wool afghan, my basset hound, Archie, coiled up on the floor at my feet.
My mother looked up from her novel. “How was he?” she asked, eyes shifting back to the open page.
“Handsome as ever. A little older. The same. Harry doesn’t change.”
“Like his father.”
“Not at all like his father,” I corrected. For once, she didn’t argue with me.
“All right. Like your father,” she said. “Did he speak to you?”
I shook my head. “No. Did you think that he would?”
“I suppose not.”
“What is there to say that hasn’t been said, after all?” I reached down to scratch Archie’s ears as he grinned up at me, tail battering against the tired herringbone floors.
“Not much,” my mother said, setting aside her book and standing up to stretch, her sleek hair skimming the tips of her shoulders. “Having said that, it wouldn’t kill him to forgive you.”
“Mom, please, it isn’t a matter of forgiveness. It runs deeper than that.”
“You were a child dealing with a monster in a monstrous situation. You did the best you could. Anyway, we’ve all paid for our sins.”
“I didn’t think you were capable of sinning,” I teased gently—something that had only become possible in the sorrowful aftermath of Camp’s death.
“Let’s just say that my sincere wish for Harry is that like me, he lives long enough to enjoy the great gift of being able to recognize his shortcomings and do something about them.”
W
E TOOK A WALK
to the top of the bluffs, to the same spot where my father stood on the last day of his life. It was probably his favorite place in the whole wide world.
“Where the waves never cease to break,” my mother said, referencing Thoreau. “I wonder if Harry will decide to revive the farm?” she said. “I suppose you’re hoping . . .”
“No,” I said. “No one has been near the place for eight years, not since Gin died and Harry bought it. The windows on the house are shuttered, the furniture is covered. The stables are empty. It’s like a remnant of Gin’s taxidermy collection, the whole place frozen in time and preserved under glass.”
“Pity no one saw the value in having Gin stuffed. Wouldn’t he have been thrilled?”
I laughed. “You know, I think he would have been.”
“Your father would have been so happy about Gin being killed hunting. Score one for the animals. Remember how delighted he was whenever a hunter got shot or fell from a tree?”
I nodded.
My mother shrugged. “I so wish your father had outlived the bastards.” She put her arm around my waist, and we stood and looked out over the water and listened to the noise of the cresting waves. “To think those goddamned Gypsy horses of his never produced a foal.”
“You miss him—Gin, I mean?” I asked her.
“I know who you mean. No,” she said. She sighed and laughed. “Yes.”
She shook her head. “Well, I’m going for a ride,” she said finally. “I think I can still handle a horse. Care to join me?”
“No, thanks. I think I’ll just go back to the house and sit on the deck.”
“Whatever you like,” my mother said. “I guess I should think about packing. I have an early flight to New York tomorrow morning. I start rehearsals for the play next week.”
After Camp died, my mother had made the decision to go back to work. “May as well get paid to pretend,” she said.
“It’s been nice having you,” I said. “I wish you could stay longer.”
“Why don’t you move? Come to New York. Honestly, Riddle, I don’t know how you stand living alone in this godforsaken place.”
“We’ve been through this a million times. I’m happy here.”
“I don’t like to think of you here by yourself,” my mother said, turning to face me.
“I’m fine. Really, I am. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
There was a brief interval of silence. “Harry could find you just as easily in New York as here in this house,” she said.
“I’ll come see you when the play opens.”
“I should hope so,” she said, reaching for her sunglasses as she made her exit. “You and everyone else. You can put it on my epitaph: ‘Here lies Greer Foley, she didn’t know much but she sure as hell knew how to fill a theater.’ ”
S
TEPPING OUT ONTO THE
deck, Archie trundling along next to me, the wind took my breath away, scattering the potted geraniums, wicker chairs tumbling, striped cushions taking flight, my cotton nightgown billowing around my knees.
I don’t think I’ll ever make my peace with the wind. A few years ago, on another windy day, not far from home, while walking at night along a conservation trail, I heard a frantic commotion ahead and joined several others in investigating the noise. Someone shone a flashlight into a small clearing in the bush. A coyote had a young deer, wide jaws clamped around the poor creature’s long muzzle. Both animals were locked in place, the coyote quietly asphyxiating its terrified prey. We clicked off the light, and we went back to where we were as if nothing had happened. As if, having caught sight of a ghost, the ghost on second glance dispersed as if there was never any ghost at all.
I was left again with an almost mythic sense of discomfiture, the feeling that there is something that exists just out of plain sight, something that wears a hood.
I
N THE AVALANCHE OF
scrutiny following Camp’s death, Gula vanished from the face of the earth. His going was as secretive as his coming.
Michael Devlin never again spoke publicly about what happened in Belgium after Camp died. He was killed five years ago in Ireland, the victim of a hit and run after threatening to divorce his wife, the thin-lipped, wide-hipped Kathleen MacNamara.
Speculation was that she was behind the wheel. Speculation was that my mother was behind the wheel, though I suspect that she started that rumor herself.
E
VERYONE, IT SEEMS, EVEN
all these years later, has an opinion about what happened that Christmas Day in Bastogne. Some people think Michael Devlin killed the little girl. Other people are convinced it was Camp. Still others think there is enough blame to go around.
Those who believe in Michael’s guilt think that Gula killed Charlie in retribution. A son for a sister. Still others argue that Gula wanted Michael to experience the pain of personal loss so he would understand the power of the secret he chose to keep.
As for Camp, well: Camp, with his professed volatility and his temperament, fit the profile better than Michael, and Camp died in the same way that Oma had died. The proof, some will argue, is in the manner of death. “Unfortunately, sometimes looking the part,” as my mother would say, “is the closest guarantee you have for getting the part.”
As for me, I know who killed that little girl at the well and who didn’t.
Harry loved his father. He experienced him as a good and honorable man, incapable of murdering a child in cold blood, even amidst the moral haze of war. As far as Harry is concerned, my father killed that child, triggering all the horrors that followed.
Harry doesn’t lie but that doesn’t mean he’s always right. It doesn’t mean he knows the truth.
T
HE WIND WHISTLING, I
watched as my mother, still slim and athletic—in so many ways, still the same beautiful girl she was—tripped down the stairs in her cream-colored jodhpurs and her white shirt, elegant gray hair blowing. I looked on as she strode purposefully across the dunes and toward the stable, and with each step another year slipped away, until the barriers that existed between then and now dissolved, Dorothy and Madge and Hilary barking and spinning and running on ahead, resisting her efforts to call them back, tubby little Vera bringing up the rear, the horses, Mary Harris and Joe Hill and Eugene Debs, and that disagreeable pony, Henry Clay, grazing in the grassy paddock under the spread of an ancient tract of trees.
The music of the waves soaring in concert with the notes of the piano, my father singing, that wonderful tenor voice of his carrying its distinctive message across the dunes and the open fields. Sometimes you could hear him singing as far away as the cormorant clock tree.
My mother thinks that I stay here for Harry, in the hope that one day he might come looking for me. Where else would he know to look, if not here? How could he find me if I were to go away? If she wants to believe that I’m waiting for Harry to come home, that’s okay.
The truth is it isn’t Harry I wait for. It’s Camp.
