Passion Play (37 page)

Fabian glanced at the letter without reading it and saw a space at the bottom still to be signed. He felt no less apprehensive, no more enlightened, than he had before.

“And what are my obligations if I choose to claim this gift?”

The bank manager brought his hands together, fingers tapping against each other. “None,” he said, “of course, none.” Then he corrected himself. “That is, none short of signing this letter of acceptance for the check that has been made out in your name.” He leaned forward, and with the tip of one finger, smoothly prodded the letter and envelope toward Fabian.

Still mistrustful and hesitant, Fabian reached for the envelope. It was unsealed. He opened it, his touch uneasy, and withdrew the large blue check that was inside.

He looked at the check, the name of the bank, its logo in thick print at the top, the date of issue a few days earlier. He saw his name, the letters typed in capitals, stretching along one line, the first and middle names he never used striking him as incongruous, occupying too much of the check’s limited space. Then his eyes moved to the line of letters, capital again, spelling out in words the full amount, the line long, again the space spilling over with words. Yet he could not get it in focus, his eyes reeling above it to the right, the figures visible and neat in their accustomed space, the dollar sign clear, then the figures blurring, the sequence of zeros
a confusion. He went back to the dollar sign, its serpentine shape curiously at odds with the directness of the figures, the number in the box reserved for dollars, the progression of zeros, those preceding the division of the comma, then those before the next comma, and finally, the two following the period in the small box, the cents.

The figures wavered, and he began again, trying to decipher them, the number and the zeros parading one after another; and only after he had taken all the steps, nine figures in all, two of which, slightly apart, stood for cents, was he able to register the magnitude of the sum. Heat started to build up under his shirt, a flush at his neck and face, as he returned to the words he had abandoned, the line now clear to him. He let his eyes move toward the bottom of the check, the flourish of official signatures, stamps and symbols of authority, the imprint of validity.

“I don’t understand,” he managed to stammer, the check adrift in his hands, raising his eyes to the manager, sweat on his forehead beading an eyebrow before he stemmed it with a brush of his hand. “Why—why is this check made out to me?”

For a moment, the bank manager’s eyes flickered in collaboration with Fabian’s bewilderment. Then he said calmly, “This check represents an unconditional gift to you, Mr. Fabian, by Miss Vanessa Stanhope. As you must know, Miss Stanhope, the only daughter of Mr. Patrick Stanhope, and a granddaughter of Commodore Ernest Tenet Stanhope, inherited at birth a substantial interest in her grandfather’s estate. She is also the sole benefactor of a trust established by him in her name. She has recently come of legal age and is therefore, as I am sure you realize, in a position to make a gift of cash.” He trailed off at the sight of the check lying on the table, where Fabian had put it. “Even, shall we say, such a substantial one, though, quite likely, only a fraction of the estate itself.” He continued. “It was at Miss Stanhope’s urgent request, Mr. Fabian, that we intervened and had you paged, so to speak, thanks to the state police.”

Even in his agitation, Fabian struggled to focus on the memory of Vanessa. He had not seen her for weeks, since the events at the Garden, although he spoke with her often on the telephone, each time from another highway booth, and she from that house he had never seen, in the midst of a family he had never met.
Frantically, he sought to recall their last conversation, but then, as always, he had wanted simply to listen to her voice, imagine her movement and expression; he remembered, though, her asking casually about his next stop, and how he had recounted the itinerary that would take him to Wellington. He remembered, also, her remark that she wanted to be with him after Wellington, the two of them watching Captain Ahab competing on the Southern horse show circuit, and his promise that he would call her from Palm Beach.

The bank manager was waiting.

“I don’t deserve such a gift,” Fabian said. “I can’t accept it.”

The manager nodded patiently, a teacher confronting a student. “It is, of course, a gift, Mr. Fabian, an amount of cash voluntarily, gratuitously and with full awareness transferred by one person to another, with no expectation of compensation.” He wanted to be certain that Fabian grasped the implication of what he was saying. “You may be confident that no issue of reciprocity, whether past, present or future, is a condition. And as the reasons for the gift are vested entirely in its donor, Miss Stanhope, in this instance, you, Mr. Fabian, as its recipient, should not want to belittle it.” He waited for Fabian’s response to his slight reproach. When it did not come, the manager slid the letter and the check closer to Fabian, as if to entice him with their presence.

“I can’t accept this gift,” Fabian said. “I just can’t.”

The manager rustled suddenly with irritation, but just as suddenly his composure returned, and he leaned toward Fabian, removing the typed letter of acceptance from beneath the check and presenting it for Fabian’s scrutiny.

“If the taxes to be paid on such a gift are your concern, Mr. Fabian, you will see that, as this letter acknowledges, they have all been paid already in their entirety by the donor, Miss Stanhope.” He reached over and with his finger drew an imaginary circle around the letter’s paragraph about taxes.

The manager settled more comfortably into his chair, convinced that his obligations in the matter had been met. Visibly expansive, he flourished a fountain pen from the inner pocket of his jacket and set it on the table, next to the check.

“Since Miss Stanhope has deposited these funds for you with us, you might wish to have this”—he inclined gracefully toward
the check—“transferred by us directly to your bank account.” He hesitated, then made his suggestion, careful not to appear pushy. “Or you might think about opening an account with us here. In any instance, we—the bank and I—are at your disposal.”

Fabian lowered his head, pretending to read the letter. Vanessa’s check waited on the table beside him, an agent of transformation, and his thoughts unreeled the lucid image of himself, of his life and the shape of it. The reel accelerated, and he saw himself suddenly free from the chance and desperation of snaring a one-on-one game, the panic before the contest allayed, the tension of the game slackening, the easy drifting away of all that was absolute in him, all that defined the elusive order of his nature.

The reel shot forward in time, and he saw himself a resident at Palm Beach, the lavish spaciousness of a Wellington duplex the successor to his VanHome. There he would be, the celebrated polo player again, the renowned author, once more a key figure on the international polo circuit, not just with Big Lick and Gaited Amble, but with a string of prize ponies at his disposal and grooms to tend them in the polo club’s own stables. Or perhaps he would return to Los Lemures—the shadow of Falsalfa gone, the dictator having been assassinated long ago—and make a princely residence in La Hispaniola, near Casa Bonita, a neighbor of the rich and powerful, his ponies always at the ready for a game or a trip to the mysteries of the interior.

He still saw his sieges of pain, his face in the mirror, the coming of old age, the time of crippling and waste, but knew that for him there would be clinics and spas, outposts of medical technology and healing, the attention of doctors, the solace of young nurses, the obliteration of pain through treatment, then the recovery, in the garden, on the terrace, at the gymnasium, health restored, age delayed.

And then he thought of Vanessa. The gift she had “voluntarily, gratuitously and with full awareness transferred with no expectation of compensation” was simply a gift of life, but of life to be lived in the fragile awareness that it came defined by the nature of the gift, the memory of the giver, and that his own life’s every moment was no longer of his own devising.

He stood up, the letter and the check on the table. “I’m
sorry, I can’t—I won’t accept Miss Stanhope’s gift,” he said, his voice sure again, the rhythm of his heartbeat and breath restored.

The manager rose in astonishment, unable to camouflage his shock. “The Stanhope family has always been one of this bank’s most highly valued clients, Mr. Fabian. I trust we have done all we can to convince you that Miss Stanhope’s gift was made in good faith—”

Fabian cut him off. “I’m certain Miss Stanhope will understand my reasons.”

He extended his hand, and the manager shook it. They walked in silence to the door. As Fabian turned to leave, the manager reassured him that, in accordance with Miss Stanhope’s instructions, her gift would be left at Fabian’s disposal, in the bank, for an indefinite time, its use subject only to Fabian’s acceptance, and signature confirming that he had received it in full.

At the wheel of his VanHome again, windows sealed against the heat and distraction of the world beyond, the receding lawns and estates, then the marshaled ranks of trailers, Fabian’s eyes moved mechanically from the highway to the odometer, the odometer to the highway, the obsessive constancy of the pendulum.

The reel was still turning in his head, merging with the road winding before him and the changing numbers of the odometer, the wheeling of the road and of his thought as one, all twining in a single thread racing toward the instruments of fate lying in wait at each turn.

He recalled, from his childhood, the fable with which his father had kept him enchanted and terrified—of the three sisters, invisible, and how they would always be near him, often when he least suspected, determining the span of his time. There was the youngest of the three, his father had told him, the most beautiful, whose task it was to survey and untangle the knot of life and recover from its maze the thread of each man’s time. And then there was the second sister, the one you could always recognize by either of the masks she wore, the funny one or the sad one. It was she who bore the measure, took the thread and
placidly went on spinning it, intent only on the turning wheel, indifferent to what pattern the thread would make. Finally, there was the oldest, so fond of her shears that she would never let them from her grasp, always eager to undo the labor and design of her sisters, to snip the thread at any time.

He thought he heard the whistling moan of the spindle, the turning wheel. He realized it was Big Lick and Gaited Amble pawing at their stalls, and he stopped reluctantly to feed them, pulling over to a rest space off the highway. The food he carried for them, the flaked maize and crushed oats, the boiled linseed, sugar-beet pulp, the forage of hay and soybean and corn, the timothy, ryegrass, clover and trefoil—all these seemed to him now an unreal substance whose only purpose was transformation into the bulk of meat, the heft of weight and strength the animal would become with time, the fuel that fed its glossy coat, the fleshed vault of its ribs and spine, the subdued prominence of its hindquarters.

Later, when noon had declined into a golden haze, Fabian stopped again, veering off the highway at the glimpse of a retreat, an unguarded field. There, stealthy as a horse thief about his rounds, he released his ponies to run, quick and urgent, steaming in sweat but never exhausted, the sole goal of the workout a translation of their weight and strength into the force and speed he would want from them in a game.

Still later, unable to focus on the road swallowed by night, he pulled to the side of an unfinished highway and, huddling in the lounge of the VanHome, napped, covering himself only with a blanket, too spent to change his clothes, unwilling to squander the time to walk up to his alcove, undress, sleep, bathe, dress again.

Fabian arrived at Totemfield toward dusk. The twilight stillness baffled him: he had not anticipated the closed fronts of shops and stores, and even the mall, always a small flurry of commerce, was abandoned. It was only after he passed an intersection and turned into the main street, sleepy and bare except for parked cars on each side of it, that he realized he had intruded on the close of a Totemfield Sunday. The
morning stir of church, the afternoon withdrawal to the intimacies of family luncheon, the evening retreat to the seclusion of home—all had subsided. An occasional car, Fabian’s VanHome in its wake, picked its way reluctantly through the deserted streets, moving as if rebuked by the spell of calm.

His reflex was to take the road to the Double Bridle Stables, but he checked himself: it was not Stella he wanted to see. Then the wry knowledge came to him that even though he knew in which part of Totemfield Vanessa’s family lived, he had never driven past their home, fearful that his VanHome might draw the attention of her family, servants or neighbors.

He took the Stanhope Hill Road, following its spiral turns, guiding his VanHome away from immaculately trimmed borders. He passed through the gate to the grounds, an ornate shield of iron, imposing but open, the ancient guardhouse locked.

As the road widened, the VanHome moved onto a smooth ribbon of fine white stone and sand, the corridor opening before him defined by neat hedges, not one capricious twig marring the symmetry of their shape.

The road forked. Far away, at the end of the drive, he saw the commanding front of the house, the sentinels of its classic pillars guarding a reach of lawn where two or three large shapes, sculptures of marble and metal, loomed in the falling light. Several cars were drawn up at the fringe of the garden, one of them a yellow convertible.

Fabian turned his VanHome to the right, toward what he took to be the service entrance, but as he arrived at it, he hesitated and continued instead past the garages, toward a row of stables and the paddocks. A brace of colts gently nuzzled the bars of the paddock, and two or three ponies were feeding calmly. In the back of his VanHome, Big Lick and Gaited Amble began to frisk, quick on the scent of other horses and the stable.