Escape the Night (12 page)

“Does he understand, Daddy?”

“No one knows.”

Peter touched his face. His skin felt cold.

“I love you, Grandpa.”

Outside, his father said softly, “It was good that you could tell him that, before he dies …”

“He hangs between death and vegetation,” Peter heard Phillip snap months later, “draining the firm with each breath.”

Phillip sat in the library with Charles, drinking cocktails. Coming to say goodnight, Peter stopped at the tone of their voices; from the hallway, he saw his father's eyes narrow. “You're getting poetic, Phil—it must be nerves.”

“I can't make any
decisions
, dammit. Banks, agents—everyone he's dealt with—they're all waiting for a miracle.”

“No,” Charles said quietly. “They're waiting for the will. As you are.”

“Damn you for accusing
me
.” Phillip's face twisted as though he had been stabbed. “All my life you've cut me down in front of him …”

“Then maybe
I
should have a stroke.” Abruptly, Charles spotted Peter in the doorway; in a soft voice he told him, “Sometimes even brothers need their privacy, all right?”

Recalling the naked woman, Peter looked away. “I'm sorry, Daddy.”

“It's just a good thing to remember.” When Peter looked up, the coolness had left his father's face. “Anyhow, it's bedtime at the zoo. Say goodnight to your Uncle Phillip, okay?”

Phillip gave Peter the same look of frightened unrecognition he had given on the day of his grandfather's ruin. “Goodnight, Prince Charming,” he managed. But his arms around Peter were limp.

Peter kissed his father and rushed upstairs to his room, sensing the two angry brothers turn to face each other …

“They're waiting for the will,” Charles repeated softly. “As you are …”

Englehardt sat in his bedroom with the tape, staring at the manila envelope, stolen from a bank vault, which a courier had just delivered.

Once more, he, Phillip Carey's secret friend, held his breath.

“Damn you for accusing
me
.” Phillip's voice crackled in the small, spartan room. “All my life you've cut me down in front of him …”

Prisoner to their tension, Englehardt could not yet bring himself to touch the envelope: with Phillip Carey, the firm might give him the power he so craved.

Only an old man's will, unopened and immutable, could turn their hopes to ashes.

“Then maybe,” Charles snapped at his brother, “I should have a stroke.”

With fumbling hands, Englehardt reached to open the envelope …

From the tape, ghostlike, Charles Carey's voice reproached him, “Sometimes even brothers need their privacy.”

Englehardt paused.

Slowly, he began to read John Carey's will.

Staring through his window, Englehardt felt the will become his future.

Like dead leaves to be raked, its pages lay behind him, strewn on the bed.

He had known its contents for an hour, and still he could not move.

Georgetown was dark; one by one, the scattered lights of neighbors vanished. But his thoughts were not of Washington, or anyone who lived there.

As if moved by another self, who knew these thoughts must now be shared, Englehardt turned at last, and walked slowly to the telephone.

His hand trembled as he reached for it; his finger dialed by rote, and yet the ringing shocked him.

It rang once, twice. With each unnerving repetition, Englehardt half-hoped for still another ring.…

And then, on the ninth ring, the voice he wished for, so familiar yet so strange to him, asked, “Hello?” and he no longer felt alone.

Englehardt closed his eyes. “This is John Joseph Englehardt,” he began softly. “Perhaps you will remember me.”

That weekend, Charles finally took Peter rowing on the lake.

It was April, and green; they faced each other, their scull skimming smooth, bright water. Peter stripped off his sweater. Charles shed his herringbone sports jacket and laid down the paddle, letting them drift through shade and sunshine, the ripple of rowboats passing …

“What are you thinking about, Daddy?”

Charles tilted his head. “You see into people, don't you, Peter?” He hesitated. “Actually, I need you to help me decide something.”

“About Grandpa?”

“In a way—about all of us, really. You know I stopped working with your grandfather after you were born—I wanted to be with you.” He paused again, folding his jacket. “Your mother …”

“She got sick.”

Charles nodded. “She seems better to me now. What do you think?”

Peter reflected. His mother had gone out more lately, smiled more, even at him. Once she had even bought a cake from the bakery and eaten it with him in the back yard, on a day when he was lonely. “I think so, yes.”

Charles seemed to weigh the meaning of his answer. “The point is that you're in school now, busy with new friends, and don't need me there so much. After all,
you're
not there either. So now I've got to decide what to do. The thing with your grandfather has been hard in more ways than you realize.”

“Will he ever be better?”

Charles stared past him. “No. He won't.”

Peter thought of how his grandfather, now so still and sad and lonely, had stood with him in the bustle of Fifth Avenue as they stared up at the tower with his name on it, where he had once stoked coal. “Then who owns his building now?”

“We don't know yet.”

Peter's head tilted in a mirror image of his father's. “Do you want to?”

Charles took out a cigarette. “It doesn't matter. Not even your grandfather can change what will happen when he dies. Not anymore.” He lit the cigarette and took one long puff, continuing in a brisker voice. “The problem is, until that happens our firm is in a terrible mess. Decisions need to be made. The people who work for us need someone they can talk to.”

“What about Uncle Phillip?”

His father gave him a long, silent glance. Quietly he said, “I don't want it to just be Phillip. Can you understand that?”

Peter remembered sitting alone with Phillip on that terrible night in Maine, watching the shapeless dark. He looked away. “Yes, Daddy. I understand.”

“Then can I go back to work?”

Slowly, Peter nodded.

He looked back toward his father. For a moment, Charles Carey's face was in shadow. The boat glided back into the light.

His father was smiling, his face soft. “There's something you should know, Peter, for the rest of your life. I always wanted a little boy. Even before I knew you I imagined how you'd be—smart and good at games, with laughing eyes and blond hair, like your mother's.” His eyes looked into Peter's. “You're the boy I imagined, Peter. Even better.”

Peter slid into his father's lap, head resting on his shoulder. They rowed like that, man and boy, through green and shadow and the cries of birds, the failing sunlight of late afternoon spreading gold upon the water.

CHAPTER 6

The weekend before Charles Carey was to return to his father's firm, Phillip invited Charles and his family to Greenwich.

“Phil probably wants to poison your potato salad,” Ruth Levy jibed. “I hope you can tell ‘Rough on Rats' from paprika.”

Charles grinned across the pillow. “It's just Phillip's idea of
rapprochement
. Dare I assume you'd miss me?”

“I already
do
, dammit.”

“Well, fear not. We've got tickets to see
Sweet Bird of Youth
, remember? I've a stake in our future.”

She frowned, then leapt up, throwing the sheets back and stalking naked to the mirror atop her antique chest of drawers. Distractedly, she began brushing her hair. Only the brass lamp on her night stand lit the room: in semidarkness her back was long, slim and pale, her face grazed by shadows, her eyes in the mirror deep black. Three years, lightly touching the corners of her mouth and brightening her thick black hair with a single strand of silver, had lent a tensile poise to the way she walked and moved, a cool directness to her gaze.

“I love you, Ruthie.”

She spun angrily. “Carey, that was the stupidest, the most insensitive, the most
male
remark …”

“I didn't mean …”

“Christ, I hate it when you do that—that fucking prep-school nonchalance, like there's no one home inside you.” Her fists clenched with rage, her shoulders bunching inward. “It's so unbelievably shallow …”

He slid out of bed and reached for her. She thrust her hand between them. “Don't.”

His arms fell to his sides. In a low voice, he said, “It's just that sometimes I don't know what to say.”

“Then say
that. That
at least I can accept.” She looked directly at him. “As I've accepted the way we are.”

“Whatever, Ruthie, you're a bit more to me than tickets …”

“I'm a serviceable pit stop …”

“Don't cheapen yourself. Do you think I don't know that you hate making love and then waking up alone? Or that we have breakfast conversations where you imagine what I say, because you can't call me?”

“Oh, God, Charles.” She turned from him. “Please, not now.”

“What makes you think I don't feel these things?” He caught himself, shrugging helplessly, then finished in a near-monotone. “I've felt too guilty to say them.”

She bent forward, one hand covering her face. “I'm sorry—I don't mean to make you say them now.”

“Perhaps I should.”

She waved the words away. “It can't be helped, Charles—I love you, regardless.”

They stood facing each other, still and naked in the yellow light. Softly, he asked, “Suppose she gave me custody?”

She reached out, stopped. Tears welled in her eyes. “Let's only talk about real things, all right?”

He clasped her shoulders. “We are, now.”

Turning, she shook her head. “It's enough you're finally coming back to work, Carey. Take it easy on yourself.”

His smile was fleeting. “You sound like my father did.”

“Then take it easy on
me
. Please.”

“If you'll tell me why you still pick houses on St. Luke's Place.” His voice lowered. “Can't we even talk about this?”

Gently, firmly, she broke away from him to sit on the edge of her bed. For a long time she stared out of the window, black, flat and skyless. When finally she looked up at him, her tone was level. “I just want you to think about it first. At least over the weekend.”

He nodded. “Then you should, too. It's not just me, you know …”

“I know.” She looked away. “Please, just hold me now.”

He did that.

Much later, still without speaking, she stretched to turn out the brass lamp.

She reached up for him then, arm curving in a graceful arc. As if in a silent dream their mouths moved toward each other, touched, and then their hands and bodies, gently and without hurry, until at last he entered her and they moved, and then cried out, as one.

Afterwards, she lay curled in his arms, warm and drowsy in the silent dark. She turned her face to his, brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “What does Peter look like?” she asked softly.

Peter grinned in the small backseat of his father's Jaguar, watching the wind ripple his mother's champagne hair.

Once more, Peter fell in love with the convertible, enraptured by the way his father took the curves approaching Greenwich—shifting and accelerating, braking and shifting—and by its closeness to the road. Passing other cars, Peter began imagining that Charles and he were racing-car drivers in pink stucco places he'd seen pictures of, like Monaco and Nice. In his mind Phillip's drive became the finish line, where the blonde American princess with his mother's hair waited in front of the rambling white house to present a gold trophy he would show his friends at school. As they wound along North Street—passing ponds, frame houses and slim pines, white picket fences and low stone walls—Peter could see the checkered flag poised above the granite pillars flanking Phillip's drive. Then his father turned through them, and the flag fell, and a jaunty Phillip Carey trotted down the front steps to greet them.

Peter had learned the solace of fantasy: he could turn it on and off like a switch. Sensing the approach of tension, he took his toy boat from the parked car and, leaving Dewey at the wheel, wandered to the big oval birdbath set in the back garden of Phillip's house.

Noiseless save for scattered birdcalls and the soft rustling of pine boughs, the spacious grounds smelled of new-mown grass. Peter placed the boat in the water, led it in a perfect circle, felt content. Slowly, between trips inside for Coke and sandwiches and to check out the adults—Phillip too cheery and solicitous, Charles too polite to both wife and brother—Peter withdrew into an imagined voyage: his grandfather sat in a deck chair with Dewey in his lap. The sun's warmth gradually unfroze his face and limbs, and he began talking to Peter about his building. His father smiled at them from behind the carved wooden wheel and said that now they could sail to Monaco …

When at bedtime Peter told him his imaginings, Charles smiled again. “I'm not sure your grandfather's ever been to Monaco,” he said. “And I know Dewey hasn't. They'd like that.”

Peter remembered something. “Dewey's still in the garage—it's too dark down there for elephants, Daddy. Please, can I go get him?”

“I'll bring him in a little bit, Peter,” Charles replied. “Then you can tell him all your plans.”

“Promise?”

Lowering his face to Peter's, Charles kissed his forehead. “Promise.”

Peter closed his eyes and fell asleep.

In the morning, Peter took Dewey and his boat downstairs, to find his father.