The Boiling Season (12 page)

U
pon my return, I did not tell Mme Freeman what had happened to Senator Marcus's home. Even so, she had seen enough for herself. Two days after my trip to Lyonville, she boarded a plane. She could not say when she would return.

Her rose garden remained unplanted.

Chapter Nine

I
t was the solitude that took the most getting used to. Solitude was something I had grown to recognize in my time at Senator Marcus's house, but I had gotten little direct experience of it myself. When she was not entertaining—or preparing to do so—Mme Marcus had often liked to read, and I frequently came upon her in her favorite chair in the sunroom, enjoying the warm wash of light soaking through the windows. When she was not reading, Mme Marcus could be found in the ballroom, practicing her minuets on the grand piano.

Until I began working for the Marcuses, I had never seen a piano, except in pictures, and in fact I was not at first certain the instrument in the ballroom
was
a piano. Contrary to everything I thought I knew about pianos, this one was ivory white. For several weeks—before I ever heard anyone play it—I eyed the piano from a distance, and once or twice I thought to ask Mme Marcus what it was, but it seemed best whenever possible not to remind her of my ignorance.

One day I happened to be passing through the ballroom alone, and with no one in sight I went over and touched the cold white finish, so glossy it felt like water flowing over a stone. I lifted the lid, and there were the keys, the big, thick white ones and the skinny, stunted black ones. Gently I pressed the very last key, and it made a sharp, hollow sound, less like music than like something clattering to the floor. Scarcely had the note stopped echoing through the room before I had returned the lid to its place and quickly stepped away.

Not long after that, I heard Madame play for the first time. Although I had no true means for comparison, I knew I had never heard anything so beautiful. I rarely had a chance to actually watch her, but whenever she played the sound resonated throughout the house, and I stopped whatever I was doing to listen. Sometimes, when it was just the two of us alone together and I knew I would not be seen, I stood in the corridor where, at just the right angle, a mirror allowed a view of her sitting at the bench, her slender fingers bouncing along the keys. Even during the most complex movements, Mme Marcus appeared at peace, the music serving only to emphasize the silence surrounding her.

This image I had of Mme Marcus was something that returned to me often in the months and then years following the renovation of the manor house at Habitation Louvois. Six months after Mme Freeman's visit to the estate was interrupted by President Mailodet's security forces, our work was completed. Rolling up their tools in their mats, the men returned to their wives and girlfriends—their small lives. The three old women who had done the cooking made their way back to Saint-Gabriel.

The painters were the last to go. On the day they finally folded up their protective sheets, I wrote a long letter to Madame, telling her the news. I led her from room to room, writing down everything I saw. By now my English was greatly improved, and I was able to fill pages with details, describing the ballroom with its floor of oak parquet in interlocking strips and squares that looked almost woven; around the windows the gold silk curtains in panels that fell like cascades from the valence; and in the dining room, the walnut coffered ceiling.

I told her about the day the plasterers working on the high ceiling in the foyer had sent the crystal chandelier crashing to the floor, destroying the fixture and chipping the marble beneath, and how after several months of searching, the interior designer had finally been able to find an identical fixture—actually in much better shape—in an antique shop oceans away. And how one of the masons knew of another long-abandoned home elsewhere on the island that had been built around the same time as Habitation Louvois and had similar floors, and one night, under cover of darkness, several of the men broke in and swapped marble slabs, and to look at the floor in the foyer now, no one who had not been there at the time would be able to say which piece had been replaced.

Although I had begun the letter filled with satisfaction over the things we had accomplished, I finished it with a sense of sadness. The letter was eleven pages long, impossible to fit into an envelope; I went through to shorten it, but there was nothing I could bear to leave out. There was already so much I had skipped over, so much that one simply had to see for oneself. I realized how hard it was going to be to live here now, having accomplished so much and having no one with whom to share it.

I
n addition to Madame, the person I would have most liked to share the estate with was M. Guinee. Although M. Guinee had never fully recovered from his illness, he had for the last several years been able to continue working at the Hotel Erdrich in a slightly reduced capacity—a shorter schedule, fewer tasks that required traversing stairs. The manager had reduced his pay accordingly and had recently begun threatening to revoke the privilege of M. Guinee's private room. He undoubtedly would have followed through, moving M. Guinee to one of the crowded dormitories where the waiters and gardeners and porters lived, but around the time the construction at the estate ended, my old friend's condition began to deteriorate even further.

M. Guinee was the only one I had told of what had happened to Senator Marcus. At the time, some of the president's circle had continued to frequent the Hotel Erdrich, and I had hoped that M. Guinee might be in a position to overhear if one of them were to let something slip. Although I had not seen him since, M. Guinee and I had kept in close contact, exchanging letters at least once a week. I told him about the state of the renovations, and he let me know what he had learned of Senator and Mme Marcus. But while I had been able to go on and on with details about the construction, M. Guinee's responses had often been no more than a few lines: “I'm afraid life here carries on as usual, with nothing new to report.”

In the year since the Marcuses' house had burned, no one had said a word. Either no one knew or they knew enough to know they should keep quiet. The closest M. Guinee ever came to openly mentioning the thing neither one of us was willing to risk naming was when he wrote, after months without news, “Do not let yourself be consumed by guilt.”

But it was not guilt I felt. If someone as powerful as Senator Marcus could not save himself, what could I possibly have done? If anything, the terrible event was proof that I had done the right thing in seeking to escape when I had. I felt no guilt, but I still had my loyalty, and how could I help Mme Freeman avoid a similar fate if I did not know how Senator Marcus had met his?

I often thought of going to see M. Guinee so that we could speak in person of the things we could not discuss in letters. A visit was the least I owed him after everything he had done for me. But it was hard to get away and harder still to see him at the hotel, where one could do nothing but watch while he was treated with so little respect.

Still, I knew I could afford to put it off no longer. Lately, M. Guinee's letters had grown more infrequent, his penmanship more unsteady. Even before I received word of his turn for the worse I feared his health—like my father's—was rapidly failing him.

M
. Guinee was alone in his room when I arrived, and I was pleased to see a plate and glass on his side table. Someone was taking care of him. He was lying in bed, and as I came in he tried to raise himself. The best he could do was lift his chin.

“There you are,” he said with a smile.

“I wanted to come sooner.”

“It doesn't matter.” He turned his head so that his eyes fell upon the chair beside the bed, and I followed the invitation to sit.

It had been a long time since he had shaved, but the beard did little to hide the hollows in his cheeks. Looking at the coarse, gray whiskers, I tried to remember how old he was. I had recently turned thirty-two, which meant he was in only his early sixties. And yet he looked two decades older.

“We just finished,” I said. “The estate is complete.”

He nodded. “I knew you would.”

I said, “I cannot wait for you to see it.” He smiled again, and it seemed to me, when I saw him like that, that it was not at all unreasonable to expect that he
would
get to see it.

“Tell me what it's like.”

I edged the chair closer to the bed, and I told him about my bedroom, with its wallpaper of textured blue roses, and my office, done up in wainscoting of rich, dark mahogany. And I described my polished maple desk, with its black leather inset and brass locks.

“It sounds beautiful,” M. Guinee said. “Just as I'd imagined.”

“Can I get you anything?” I checked to see that his water glass was full. “Something to drink? Something to eat?”

He closed his eyes. “I have everything I need.”

“You look tired,” I said, and he rolled his head away.

He took a slow, deep breath. “I'm sorry I wasn't more help.”

“Not at all.” I squeezed his arm. “It was foolish of me to think we could ever find out.”

“They might still be alive.”

At one time it would have comforted me to hear him say so. I had spent months thinking about what might have happened to the Marcuses, considering every possibility. If they were dead, I had been quick to reason, we would have heard. The paper would have said they died in the fire. It would have been the perfect cover-up. But they never said that, and the only possible reason I could see was that the Marcuses were still alive. I had needed it to be so.

Following their disappearance, a long period had passed in which everything I did, everything I saw, everything I heard, reminded me of the Marcuses. With everyone I encountered—every plumber and electrician, every deliveryman at the gate—no matter the topic of conversation, I found myself desperate to mention the Senator and his wife. Knowing how dangerous it was only made the urge that much more unbearable. It was as if recklessness alone might somehow preserve them. And the more I distrusted the man with whom I was talking, the more my pulse pounded, the more I had to struggle to resist. But I always did. Instead of saying their names I might say instead, “
A former employer of mine
smoked that very same tobacco,” or “I once knew
a woman, the wife of a lawyer
, who detested cats.” In that way, I forced even strangers to become bearers of the Marcuses' memory.

Of late, however, as the reality of what had happened settled in, the urge to remember had begun to diminish, and in its place I felt a new and equally strong urge to forget.

M. Guinee closed his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can see how tired you are. I should let you sleep.”

“I think I will sleep for a while.”

His breathing was labored. It was as though there were not enough air in the room for both of us. I got up from the chair and moved away from the bed. Standing against the wall, I watched him until my legs grew tired, and then I lowered myself to the floor, where eventually I too fell asleep.

It was dark when the chambermaid came in to check on him. She woke me with a touch.

“He's asleep,” she said.

I stood groggily. “Is he getting any better?”

She shook her head kindly.

“What does the doctor say?”

She picked up the empty plate from the side table, avoiding my glance.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out several bills. I handed them to her. “Please call the doctor,” I said. “Call him now.”

“I don't think it would do any good.”

I pressed the money into her hand.

“I have to go,” she said. “I can't let the manager find me here.”

“Promise that you'll call.”

She refilled his glass with water and said, “For when he wakes up.”

I
spent the night on M. Guinee's floor. The discomfort felt less like a punishment than a duty. I reminded myself that as a boy I had known children who slept standing up because there was no room on the floor of their cramped houses for everyone to lie.

In the morning the doctor arrived, the same ragged man I had met before. It had been more than four years, and he seemed to have aged without changing his clothes. Rumpled and dusty myself, I had few grounds for complaint.

The doctor took M. Guinee's pulse and listened to his chest.

“I'd say he's as good as can be expected,” he told me as we stepped outside.

“Is there nothing you can do?”

“About death?” he said, picking up his decrepit bag. “Only the same things anyone can do.”

“We have to do something.”

“You can make him as comfortable as possible.”

After the doctor left, I spent a few minutes cleaning up M. Guinee's room. No one had dusted and swept for months. I took the extra blanket outside to air it in the sun. I had just gone back inside when there was a knock on the door. I hurried to answer it before M. Guinee awoke.

Outside on the step, glancing disdainfully down his pimpled nose, twitched a gaunt young man in a crisp, red blazer bearing the Hotel Erdrich crest on its breast. Everything about him made me want to close the door and go back inside.

“You have to leave,” he said brusquely.

“Who are you?”

He sniffed at the question as if its smell offended him. “The manager says you are to leave. Now.”

“He's dying,” I said, gesturing indignantly toward the bed.

The young man glanced sourly over my shoulder.

“You can leave now, or you can wait for the police to take you away.”

“What have I done wrong?”

“It upsets the guests to have doctors around.”

“What guests?”

His eyes seemed to quiver.

“If they dislike doctors,” I said, “I imagine they'll be even less pleased to see the police.”

“I wouldn't worry about that.” His eyes suddenly sparkled. “The police know how to be discreet.”

I felt the anger rising in my throat, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I stepped outside, closing the door behind me. “Have you no decency?”