Quartet for the End of Time (19 page)

One evening, however, his mother broke the silence he had come to rely upon—to take almost for granted—since his return to his parents' house. Not even his father had yet spoken to him directly about what had occurred (or failed to) and, in sharp contrast to the atmosphere that had reigned in the house before the riots, the only sounds to be heard during
mealtimes now were of Germaine's heavy tread as she delivered the plates from the kitchen, and the persistent clatter of cutlery on glass. He could only assume—so silent had his father so far remained on the subject—that his mother and Sutton knew nothing (or very near nothing) of what had happened at all.

You know, his mother said to him, however—quietly, one evening, and in so casual a tone that at first he suspected she might simply complete the sentence with “I've been hunting for this piece for over an hour”—it's Sutton you have to thank.

What? Alden said. So surprised was he by his mother's words that it was really as if, at first, he hadn't heard. Then, having made sense of the words, but not yet even beginning to guess at their meaning, he added, incredulous:
For what?

His mother was regarding him carefully now. Alden could not remember a time when she had looked at him like that. Not since, perhaps, his earliest childhood. As if she could …
see
him. And not just him as he was in that moment, but—all the way down. As if she
knew
him, better than he knew, or was ever likely to know, himself. He shifted uncomfortably under her gaze, and realized with a hot flash of shame how unreasonable it was of him to suppose that there was anything at all his mother did not know.

It was she who saved you, his mother said. It is probable that—without her help—even your father wouldn't have been able to; the sort of (only now did she drop her gaze) trouble you were in. Only now did her hands become suddenly restless, smoothing, nervously, the fabric of her pleated skirt, before returning to the table in order to hunt out the missing pieces still scattered there.

Alden, confused, sat opposite, shaking his head. What? he said again.

So his mother, in a steady voice, which surprised him—neither gentle nor severe—as though she were recounting to him a subject that had now, to either one of them, only the most immaterial connection—explained to him everything she could about what had passed between Sutton and the Judge on the morning following the riots. About the hat—and the man who would be wearing it, and about how
(as the Judge told Sutton then, and Alden must surely—his mother urged him—know himself) what at first might appear to be a stretching of the truth at times corresponded more accurately to the truth than the truth itself …

Alden's mind spun.

The hat, the hat.

He remembered it all too clearly. How Arthur had locked arms with the tall officer, attempting to remove what had not—what never had— belonged to him.

How could Sutton—he thought—
knowing
? She must—he considered—have
recognized, known
—and not merely
because she was told
, been able, simply—

But then the rest of the story began to settle in his mind.

Who, then—he considered, finally—would have been left to take the charge? A cold chill—of recognition; at last, of understanding—ran the length of Alden's spine. He got up unsteadily. His right leg had fallen asleep beneath him, he found, and now the feeling returned painfully.

I just thought you should know, his mother said, looking up at him. Uncertain—apologetic now. I just thought— she said. But he did not wait to hear what she thought. And he never would know, because the subject was never broached between them again.

A
FTER THAT
, J
UST AS
before the riots, Alden began to spend as little time at his parents' house as he could. He left early in the morning, shortly after rising, and did not return until after dark. Now, though, because he had nowhere else to go—it was to Jack Nancy's house that he went.

—

J
ACK
N
ANCY
,
THE YOUNGER
—
ONETIME
A
LEXANDRIA
C
OUNTY FOOT
-ball star—had been laid up all that summer, 1932, with a strain to his lower back. Alden spent most of August laid up alongside Jack—at Jack's mother's place in Kalorama. They stayed inside, in Jack's big upstairs room, ringing the bell and ordering more tea and food. The
maid, a Negro, by coincidence also named Nancy, lumbered, frowning, all month long, up and down the stairs. The more old Nancy frowned, the more young Nancy rang that bell. Alden laughed.

You got it coming, Li'l Nancy, he'd say.

But he never did. The lines of old Black Nancy's frown only deepened throughout the afternoon, finally becoming so dark and set, her eyes so fixed in her head, and her movements so increasingly rigid as she set down each tray, that by three o'clock in the afternoon it seemed that instead of, like everyone else, being made out of flesh and blood, she had been carved out of stone. They whittled away at her all afternoon. The trays arrived, growing so heavy as the day wore on that soon the glasses were rattling and the tea was sloshing around in each glass, spilling out sometimes over the rim as it was set down abruptly before them, and left to puddle on the tray. As if to compensate for Black Nancy's increased sourness, young Nancy stirred more sugar in his tea, and with every teaspoon became more lighthearted, so that by midafternoon his misery would be quite forgotten. The pain of his lower back would slowly dissipate, and soon he would be raised on an elbow, regaling Alden with fantastic accounts of his past and future glories. He was like his old man in that way—Nancy the Elder. He liked to hear himself speak. He was an old money man, the elder Nancy—who had somehow got himself tangled up in politics. Now he was a senator. Funny the way life goes, he'd say, as though he had had no hand in the business. Everyone, including Judge Kelly, had always liked the elder Nancy, especially from a little distance. Once you were in the same room together and got him talking, though, it was nearly impossible to get him to stop. Everything reminded him of something else, and when you finally managed to escape, it was through a gap in the story that in no way resembled the one through which you came.

It's like his tongue isn't hinged on right, the Judge said. It flaps.

Nancy the Younger was just the same, only he had less to be reminded of and so less to recollect. With him, it was always the fiftysix-yard field goal with which he'd managed to secure the champion-ship
win for Eastern High as a freshman back in '29, or the time he'd caught his sister in the hall closet with his father's secretary—who, when Li'l Nany had discovered them, had covered his face with his hands, neglecting his more private parts. Never once did he talk about the one thing Alden was genuinely curious about: the occasion when, at the age of five or six, Li'l Nancy (who apparently had a knack for stumbling upon his family members at their most compromised) had discovered his grandfather, Old Mister Nancy, dangling from a ceiling hook at the old Kalorama place. That was shortly before they had moved to the Hill and their fathers, then they themselves, had become friends. And when it came to it, if it was a friend you wanted, you couldn't get much better than Li'l Nancy. Alden knew that. Especially that summer. He would talk your ear off, that was sure, and never about the thing you wanted him to, but still you'd never be bored, listening. Even when you'd heard the same story a thousand times. There was something about him that held your attention that way— and even Black Nancy, though she pounded up those stairs with a fatally heavy tread in the waning hours of each day, was so crazy about him that when he died, ten years later—late September 1942— his plane spiraling into the waters of the North Atlantic, she cried for six days straight. Then, on the seventh day, Mrs. Nancy suffered a stroke, leaving the left side of her face completely paralyzed and destroying her ability to eat or speak. This brought Black Nancy up short. She said, If it ain't the one thing, it's sho' enough the othah— and there wasn't any use in crying about it. This was all recorded in a letter Sutton wrote to Alden shortly thereafter, so that was how he came to know about it.

That was the same year, incidentally—1942—their own father, Judge Kelly, died. Mary Kelly, who had for some time by then resided at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, just outside the city, and who rarely involved herself, even by way of the most cursory response, in the more ordinary happenings of the world, including those most ordinary happenings of all, life and death, and who barely batted an eye when her own husband's death was announced, had shaken her head when she heard.

Black Nancy, she said, was the only good thing that ever happened to that family.

But that was all still sometime in the future.

M
RS
. N
ANCY HAD BEEN
an inveterate “cave dweller,” as the old money types of the Kalorama District were known, who couldn't “hack it” (her own words) in town. When Jack had been twelve, she had divorced the elder Nancy and moved back to Kalorama for good, taking Jack and Black Nancy with her. (Alden had heard her say it himself: “I couldn't hack it,” she'd said—her sensitive nose pink at the edges and quivering slightly—as if her marriage had been nothing more complicated or binding than a challenging round of golf.)

So it was in the company of three of the Nancys: Mrs. Nancy, Li'l Nancy, and old Black Nancy, that Alden spent that last, unsufferably hot month of the summer of 1932. Stuffing himself on Black Nancy's sweet tea and sandwiches.

I'm going to be a big fat man, just like my father, Jack would say miserably, just before noon. But by four o'clock he would be raised on an elbow again. I am, after all, within my rights, he would inform Alden smugly, to be a fat man if I so choose and desire. But you—he said— pointing a thick finger at his friend, or swiping away the half-finished plate of sandwiches as Alden reached for another—you have no excuse. Who—he said, his mouth, at the corners, already beginning to break into a wide grin—ever heard of a fat
Commie
?

Before even finishing the sentence he would already have busted out laughing, muffling the final word. The force of the laughter, however, would always serve to remind him of the crippling pain caused by the dislocated disc in his lower spine.

Goddammit, he would yell. Goddamn you, you are killing me.

D
URING THE DAY
—
LAID UP
in Kalorama with Jack Nancy—Alden's mind would be blank and calm. But when he returned home at night, he would often find himself, against his will and better judgment, once again running over the course of events in his mind, and wondering in
what way, or at what point, he might have recognized within them some sort of pattern; some way, that is, of recognizing—and thereby affecting—what was (though he could not have known it then) already to come. But he could detect no pattern; no, nothing beyond the brute facts of what had occurred: the sudden—material—onslaught of bricks and metal from the approaching cavalry; then the manner in which one of them (as though there had existed for it all along no other course) connected with the skull of Douglas Sinclair.

In none of it—no blow given or received, nor the manner in which, shortly afterward (though he could hardly recall it) their hands had been bound behind their backs, and he, along with Douglas, still bleeding, and Arthur, had been led away—could he find one single immaterial thing that he might have seized upon in order redirect the course of things. Still, he continued to trouble over it, his thoughts repeating themselves; turning over the same, stubborn groove. By what method, he wondered, might he train them toward some different end? (It was, as he had reflected on countless occasions, hardly worthwhile to dwell on the past.) If there existed any way of affecting the future, it would have to be—he reasoned—not, as he had so far supposed, in the discovery of some auxiliary route based upon and beginning from the moment at hand but in altering the direction of the route along which one had already come. Where he had previously envisioned, that is, a complete break with the past, it was obvious no break could possibly be! The future, he realized, quite unmistakably now, would always arrive in some recognizable form. He recalled, for example, the look in the eyes of the Bonus Army in the moment they had turned—as if a single man—to face the approaching cavalry, who had just then begun toward them at a charge. There had been fear— yes. And anger. Both of which Alden understood. But there had been something else, too, which at the time he'd found difficult to place. It occurred to him now what it had been: a look of absolute recognition. The look of a man who stares at his own face in the mirror, say, and— though he does not always like what he sees—registers, through the simple fact of his gaze, an exact equivalence. A complicity with image
and form, which at once cancels out both true judgment and every course of action that has not already been tried.

And so it was, and had always been, Alden thought—throughout history. Where no man or woman had any other manner of looking at the world, except to stare back at the past. No wonder they found themselves so hopelessly trapped there! Yes, he thought, it was that … simple acknowledgment—of there being no actual distance to traverse between the future and the past—that had filled him suddenly, in the moment of the cavalry charge, with a horror more devastating than the rush of smoke and dust, or the volley of guns, or even his own intentions (the probable effect, that is, of the small block of wood he then carried on his person; an object that, though it appeared innocent enough and measured less than six inches in diameter, soon promised—by means of a small vial of sulfuric acid, a blasting cap, and a stick of dynamite lodged within its hollowed core—to achieve for itself a very different meaning).