Allegiance (14 page)

“What, then?” I move my hand. “This?”

Suzanne's tone changes. “No, Cash. Loving me. Loving me would make me yours.” I take three words of breath. Suzanne puts a finger to my open mouth, then pushes it shut. “You'll catch flies.” She tugs her dress down. “Now's
not the time. But if my disarray isn't too evident, perhaps you'll give me the honor of a dance.”

I take her hand, leading her out through the bushes. The night is cold and dark around us, and again I remember Northeast Harbor. Just a few days after she put her hand in mine on the dock we were out sailing, lolling on a fitful breeze near Sutton Island. There were a couple more islands below us to the south, but to the east the bay opened up and there was nothing but ocean, and you understood how people could think they'd fall off the edge of the world if they went too far.

It's hard to tell distance on an ocean like that, and the thunderheads massing out over the bay started coming in on us while I was still thinking they might pass by up the coast. Suzanne and I reached the same conclusion at the same time, and without a word we were suddenly very busy coming about and pointing the boat homeward. But even what breeze we'd had was gone, like a small animal scared off by the approach of something much larger. The water was flat. “We can run before it a while,” Suzanne said. “Once it gets closer.”

I didn't think much of this idea, but I nodded. We floated for a spell in the calm, almost dead in the water, while a dark unnatural green spread across the sky. We were hundreds of yards from the mouth of the harbor, where we could find some shelter, with tiny Bear Island in our way. We could pass behind it in some safety, perhaps, but it would still be a long reach in.

After a bit we got the first stirrings of the storm and the sails filled and the boat began to move across the water at a good clip. Then the rain started falling, with a couple of hailstones rattling on the deck for good measure, and I could see we were in a race we were going to lose. “We can't make it back,” Suzanne said. She had to yell for me to hear her, and the point was clear enough that it didn't merit discussion. I nodded. Her face was pale in the gloom. Bear Island was coming up, and I pointed at it. It held nothing but trees and a fog bell, but there was a sandy patch of beach on the south side where I thought we might get ashore without damaging the boat too badly.

Suzanne nodded too. We turned the boat straight inland and ran it up on the beach with a grinding noise that made us both wince. Then we jumped out and dragged it from the water while the green sky went black with rain
and dark waves heaved themselves out of the ocean to fall upon the shore and burst in spray. We ran for cover into the trees, already soaked, and huddled in what shelter we could find while great sheets of water sluiced past.

Suzanne crouched down in a ball at the foot of a big pine and hugged her knees to her chest. She was shivering, and I could hear her teeth clicking against each other as I bent near. I leaned over her and put my arms around her and tried to hold her still. We stayed like that for what seemed like an hour as the trees creaked above us, my face in her hair and the water cold on my back but warming between us where we pressed together. After the storm weakened enough for us to talk, Suzanne slipped out of my arms and turned to me and put a hand up to my face.

“You'll take care of me,” she said. It wasn't a question; she said it like it was something she'd just learned. She brushed my hair back out of my eyes. “You'll take care of me if something happens.”

“What else could happen?” I asked, and I laughed a little, because it was starting to seem like a fine adventure, and I'd enjoyed holding her in my arms.

“I don't mean here,” she said. She pointed with one finger, her arms still tight across her chest, past the island and the sea and the summer and out into the world beyond. “I mean out there. It's something I know about you now. And I'm glad I know it.”

I didn't say anything to that. It was 1935, and plenty of things were happening out there. My family didn't have much to fear, and I didn't think Suzanne's did either, but I didn't need to ask what she meant. Instead I nodded and reached out and took her in my arms again for a while. And when it seemed clear that the storm had passed, she squeezed my hand and we got up and walked through the trees back down to the beach, still holding hands. And we pushed the boat into the water and sailed for home.

I am thinking of this as I walk through the Merion brush with her hand in mine, and I wonder if she is too, if she thinks of that day like I do. Under the moon her face is rounder and soft, letting me see how much nineteen is still a child. The light and warmth of the clubhouse is almost a shock, like her house felt when we finally burst through the door, still in our wet clothes and shivering again. I decide that a drink is the remedy, and a brisk restorative dance.

Later we stand on the balcony again. Other couples huddle together nearby, talking in quiet tones. Suzanne clutches my jacket around her with one hand and holds her fourth glass of champagne in the other. “I hate seeing everyone in uniforms,” she says. “I hate this war. Oh, why didn't you come back to Philadelphia?”

There are patches of snow on the great lawn, and a few dead leaves blowing across the grass. “I know I haven't been back much,” I say. “It just got very busy all of a sudden.” There is no answer. “It's important work,” I say. The words sound thin. “Like your father said.”

For a moment she says nothing. She just looks at me, her slender body swallowed in the jacket. “Have you ever seen your death, Cash?” Her voice is quiet. “Soldiers do. There's a ball of fire, or a Japanese plane. There's a roaring sound. Then just blackness. At least that's what they tell girls, to make them surrender. To give themselves up. But you can't tell the girls that, can you? What do you say to them? To the girls you have in DC?”

“I don't have any girls in DC.”

“I think everyone should have someone else. So if one person lets you down, you aren't all alone.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I say.

“It's so silly,” she says. “We think we can control things. We think we know what's going to happen.”

“I don't think that.”

She goes on as if she hasn't heard me. “All our plans. What do they say about mice and men?”

“Suzanne,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Don't say you love me. I won't believe it. Say you're coming back. Say you're coming back now, and I'll do whatever you want.” She takes half a step into me. I feel the soft pressure of her breasts against my chest, the delicate bones of her back under my hands. Her heartbeat echoes through my body, rapid, like the wings of a bird. And I know I can't do it. There is still a mission for me; there is a duty unfulfilled.

“There's something strange going on at the Court,” I say. “It's hearing cases it shouldn't. And some people are following me. I need to figure it out.”

The pressure stops. “What do you mean, following you?” Her voice is sharp. “You never told me anything about this.”

“I didn't want to worry you.”

“That's ridiculous. Will it be better that I didn't worry when I hear that you've been kidnapped or garroted or whatever?”

“See, this is why I didn't tell you. They're Agriculture guys. Nothing's going to happen to me.”

Suzanne squints her eyes shut. I see the child there again for a second, eyes closed in tiny fury—
I'm going with you!
—and then it is gone and she is a young woman in pain. “I can't go on like this,” she says. “I need you to come home. I'm not strong enough for this. Maybe you are, but I'm not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No. I thought I was, but I'm not.” Suzanne lifts the champagne glass to her lips and seems surprised to find it empty. She lets it fall to the floor, where it breaks with a small tinkle. “I feel sick when I think about you, Cash. Seasick, like there's something skewed in the world and I can't get my balance. Like each day coming is a wave that makes it worse. And I can't tell if the wave is regret or love or guilt. I can't even tell them apart.”

“You're drunk,” I say.

“I am. But it doesn't change anything. It doesn't change the future. It doesn't change the past. People change, but we only change in one direction and never go back.”

I find I do not like the tack the conversation is taking. “What do you mean?”

She looks at me and there is the challenge in her face, and then it slips away and there is just a pleading. “You can't expect me to be like you. You don't need people. I do.”

“Of course I need people,” I say.

She pays no attention. “It would have been different if I'd known you were in danger. I could have been like a war bride. But you only talked about tennis.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You'd have to understand,” she says. “If I did something I shouldn't. If I maybe kissed someone.”

I take a step back. She holds her hands out to me, as if she's reaching through water. And I remember how I would lean out from the dock after she vanished into the ocean, looking for her and seeing first only the deep
green, then bubbles, then her white hands and shoulders as she rose and broke the surface, a pale girl gliding toward the sun. I remember the moment on the dock, a couple of days after the storm, when I reached out to her. For all that her hand was hot, I trembled as I took it, and for all that her lips were warm, my teeth were chattering as we kissed. And when our lips met I felt as though I'd been underwater for a long time, straining toward the light and had just broken out into the air and sun. It felt like the air was bursting out of my lungs and the bursting out itself was a relief, even though I knew what I wanted was the breath that was yet to come.

At dinner she was flushed and giggling, and that night for the first time the Judge asked me what I would do with myself. And for the first time he opened a leather-bound book and read me a story in which the law glinted like a fish and was gone.

Now she is reaching out; she touches me, and she is the one who trembles. But I am not ready for the touch. I am thinking of how she smiles into my kiss, the corners of her mouth upturned like a cat's, of how she puts her hand over my heart. I am thinking of her doing all this with someone else—with John Hall!—and the pain is extraordinary.

“You'd understand,” Suzanne repeats. It is like a brick in my chest. I step back again.

“I'd try,” I say. “I don't know.”

It is the only answer I have at the moment, but of course it is the wrong one. Suzanne gives a little gasping sob and my mind changes in an instant. I put my arms around her, but she slips free and hurries down the stairs. I stand holding the empty jacket. With honking cries, a bird passes invisibly above.

After a moment I go into the ballroom, but she isn't there anymore. I get a Scotch and watch the kids dance. It is a scene from my youth, the men at the tables, the children out on the floor. But now I am one of the men who watched us, and I know what they thought. They thought that we would die, and they wondered whether to be happy that we didn't know it. There is Bill Fitch, now flying an Army bomber; there is Ralph Hays in Navy blue.
How would you live if everything recurred?
A philosophy professor asked us to contemplate this at Penn. It is a child's thought, I see now, that the present will
never end. How do you live knowing it won't return, that everything happens just once and rolls away into the past? Suzanne was right; we only change in one direction and never go back. I have a sudden memory of how she used to tug on my sleeve when we walked. For a moment it is almost paralyzing.

You see time's knife unsheathed
. That's how the Judge described getting older, one evening over glasses of fire and smoke. But it is not just time; there is the war, too, pushing everything faster, accelerating the reckoning that awaits us all. I see in my mind the narrow band of names around the base of the flagpole. We will need more space this time.

That is where I find her, standing by the flagpole looking at the names. She puts out her hand without looking up, and I take it. Then she is in my arms. “Take me home, Cash,” she says. “Just take me home.”

• • • • 

The next day is bright and cold and I am sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee when I see her little red coupe coming up the drive. I have been thinking that I am big enough to excuse a misstep. After all, I reason, am I not at least partially in the wrong myself? Didn't I force this separation on her, which she never wanted? And didn't I make eyes at the senorita at Cissy's house, try to impress her with my tales of Fish House Punch?

I am ready for a tender reconciliation, but Suzanne is all business.

“The Judge agrees with me,” she says. “You should come home.”

“What do you mean?”

“Quit the job. It's not worth it. You're in danger.”

“I don't think I am,” I say. “And I need to stay there. The Court is the only place I can figure out who's influencing the clerks.”

“What makes you think anyone's influencing them?”

“I told you, they're the only ones who could be making the Justices agree to hear these cases.”

“But why does anyone have to be influencing them? Maybe they're doing it on their own. Maybe they're part of it.”

The idea has not occurred to me. “But the Justices hire their own clerks. No one could put their people in there.” Even as I say it, I realize this isn't true. Most Justices have professors they rely on . . . and, I remember, Frankfurter
himself has done a lot of the selection where Harvard men are concerned. What had he said to me that first evening?
I used to pick Brother Black's clerks.
 . . . Perhaps Gressman was right about him all along.